Hypocrisy, hubris and Rielle Hunter. For a man whose first—and only—winning election campaign was waged against an inarticulate septuagenarian hog farmer, John Edwards made quite a splash when he arrived in Washington in 1999 as the new junior senator from North Carolina. Lauch Faircloth (the hog farmer in question) had been anything but a formidable [...]
Archive for January, 2010
The Hazards Of Loyalty
Posted in Politics, tagged John Edwards on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
The Obama Spell Is Broken
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique. The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon. [...]
Carlos the Brand
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Strange but true on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
The Jackal has a brand to protect. Life for terrorists is improving in the U.S., with the Detroit bomber enjoying his right to remain silent and negotiate a plea bargain, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his Guantanamo mates head for a civilian trial. At least we can say America hasn’t gone as far as France [...]
Baby in court
Posted in Law, Weird cases on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
At the centre of a recent custody battle in Sarasota County Circuit Court, Florida sat the exceptionally cute Eli. He is only 11-months old, still in nappies and does not understand the legal fight over him between James Casey and Virginia Valbuena. Of course, it’s always difficult for someone so young to understand litigation but [...]
Chávez Drops the Democracy Mask
Posted in Politics, tagged Venezuela on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Venezuela’s president promises ‘radical measures.’ Hugo Chávez likes to say that Venezuela is a democracy and that a majority of the electorate supports him and his “21st Century Socialism.” Or at least he used to make that claim. Last week the strongman gave up trying to maintain a democratic image. Referring to nationwide civil protests—led [...]
Uncommon Knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged January 31 2010 on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Sometimes high is sexy, sometimes low When describing positions of relative status, people often use adjectives related to height, as in “top choice,” “up the food chain,” or “high end.” A recent study finds that this association even extends to judgments about the attractiveness of the opposite sex. Women rated pictures of men as more [...]
Heated debate
Posted in The Word, tagged January 31 2010 on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Why shouldn’t a temperature be ‘warm’? When the weatherperson predicts “warmer temperatures,” do your usage antennae quiver? Mine either – but some people do have a problem with such expressions. It’s a rare peeve, but a couple of weeks ago it popped up again, like a dormant virus newly revived and ready to spread. The [...]
O camel! my camel!
Posted in Poetry on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Why the Arab world is re-embracing the poetry of the desert She is the dream that scatters with the sun, Absorbed into flame and flame absorbing, Eternal motion one with endless peace, The camel has no was or will be, only being. The above lines are the final stanza of a poem I recently completed, [...]
Justice, medieval style
Posted in History on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
The case that ‘trial by ordeal’ actually worked For the better part of a millennium, Europe’s legal systems decided difficult criminal cases in a most peculiar way. When judges were uncertain about an accused criminal’s guilt, they ordered a cauldron of water to be boiled, a ring to be thrown in, and the defendant to [...]
How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel Imagine that your stockbroker – or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips – called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and [...]
The book of Jobs
Posted in Computers, Economy and business on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how [...]
The week ahead
Posted in The Week ahead, tagged January 31 2010 on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Talk of a European bail-out for Greece • JUDGMENT will be passed on the Greek government’s budget-cutting plans by the European Commission on Wednesday February 3rd. The country’s public finances are in a parlous state and fears that the markets may lose faith in Greece altogether were only partly allayed when it recently raised €8 [...]
Tony Blair’s 2010 vision
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Politics, tagged Iraq, UK on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Britain’s Iraq war inquiry The prime minister who took Britain into Iraq defends his record TONY BLAIR arrived early to give his much-anticipated evidence to Britain’s Iraq inquiry on Friday January 29th, avoiding the small band of protesters who braved the drizzle outside, waving placards proclaiming “Jail Tony” and the now-traditional “Bliar”. The relatives of [...]
It Happened in Our Backyard
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on January 31, 2010 | Comments Off
We sympathized with the concerns about security and inconvenience raised by the Justice Department’s plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind, at a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, a short walk from ground zero. But caving in to political pressure and agreeing to move the trial, as The Times reported the Obama [...]
Remembrance of Candy Bars Past
Posted in Other on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
How a wave of consolidation lay waste to regional treats like the Fig Pie and the Seven Up Bar In Merriam, Kan., the Russell Sifers Candy Company produces what must be the messiest candy bar in the United States. The Valomilk, first introduced in 1931, is a thin cup of chocolate filled with vanilla syrup. [...]
Crash Blossoms
Posted in On Language, tagged January 31 2010 on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.” In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert [...]
How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young
Posted in Health on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells’ life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national [...]
Another Inconvenient Truth
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Law on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
Back last November. … Wow, that seems like a long time ago. Health care was passing. Jay Leno was popular. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. As I was saying, last November, the Justice Department announced that the terror trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be held in Manhattan. Almost everyone in New York rallied around. This [...]
Lost in Translation
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
President Obama’s State of the Union address soared — right over a familiar cliff. The president simply couldn’t seem to escape his professorial past, to convey his passion and convictions in the plain words of plain folks, and to breach the chasm between the People’s House and people’s houses. He’s still stuck on studious. He [...]
The Pre-Postmodernist
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Literature, tagged Salinger on January 30, 2010 | Comments Off
THE life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career — consisting of a long short story called “Hapworth 16, 1924” that reads as though [...]
Battling the Information Barbarians
Posted in History, Other, Politics on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google. A message of support for Google left outside the company’s Beijing office on Jan. 14. In 1661, Adam Schall, a Jesuit missionary from Germany and astronomer [...]
Five Best Books Set in the British-colonial East
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
Janice Y.K. Lee on novels set in the British-colonial East 1. The Hamilton Case By Michelle de Kretser Little, Brown, 2003 Conflicted, painfully snobbish Sam Obeysekere would rather be “under an imperialistic yoke than put [his] trust in a fellow who went about in sandals.” Sam, an Oxford-educated Ceylonese lawyer, lives in colonial duality: a [...]
A Collision of Church and State
Posted in History on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
War, revolution, Dreyfus and an era of religious and political turmoil Two monuments in Paris are so prominent that they’re hard to miss. One is the Eiffel Tower, of course, the all-iron tour de force of engineering, standing by the Seine amid the city’s spacious and supremely elegant West End. Then to the north, atop [...]
Salinger’s Long Goodbye
Posted in Literature, tagged Salinger on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
How do you mourn a writer who departed years ago? Ordinarily, when a great writer dies, it is easy to know what to feel. We are grateful for everything he has given us, and we grieve that he will not be giving us anything more; in time, we start asking the questions, about the nature [...]
Tiffany Murray’s top 10 rock’n'roll novels
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
From High Fidelity to Heathcliff, the novelist presents the novels that epitomise teen spirit Audience members at a 1963 Beatles concert. Tiffany Murray’s first novel Happy Accidents was shortlisted for the Bollinger/Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Diamond Star Halo, her second, was published earlier this month. She studied at UEA, and has taught creative writing [...]
Matt Rees’s top 10 novels set in the Arab world
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
The Jerusalem-based crime writer picks novels that offer ‘a much more profound contact’ with this region than the news A Cairo mosque. Matt Rees was born in Newport, Wales in 1967, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1996. As a journalist, Rees covered the Middle East for over a decade for the Scotsman, then Newsweek [...]
James McCreet’s top 10 Victorian detective stories
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
The debut crime novelist offers some alternatives to the fanciful solutions and foggy London of Sherlock Holmes Tom Smith, a well known ‘Peeler’ (so called after Robert Peel, who reorganised the Police Force in 1829). James McCreet is the author of The Incendiary’s Trail, a Victorian detective thriller influenced by the early works of Edgar [...]
Tim Key’s top 10 bite-size books
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
On the shortest day of the year, with scant shopping hours left to Christmas, the comedian recommends books that won’t detain you long Little nuggets … A fox squirrel in the snow nibbles on a seed. Tim Key is a 33-year-old who works in the broad arenas of poetry, comedy, general, film and bookwriting. His [...]
David Charters’s top 10 books about bankers
Posted in Literature on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
From Tom Wolfe to JK Galbraith, the banker-turned-novelist gives the inside deal on the best investments you can make in financial reading Traders in Barclays Tower, Canary Wharf. David Charters is a former diplomat and investment banker, who left the City after 12 years of working on many large international flotations and privatisations. He has [...]
Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s top 10 bird poems
Posted in Birds of America, Literature, Poetry on January 29, 2010 | Comments Off
From nursery rhyme to Baudelaire, the birdwatcher and the poet spot literature’s finest flights of fancy Listen up … A wandering albatross tests the air on a clifftop near Auckland, New Zealand. As well as being one of Britain’s most popular and acclaimed poets, Simon Armitage is also a dramatist, novelist, broadcaster and the winner [...]
