Leonardo’s ‘The Virgin and Child With St. Anne’ Can we call something both unfinished and perfect? It’s not hard to say yes if the thing is literary (Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”) or even musical (Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony). With painting, the question is tougher to answer. Let me suggest at least one candidate for unfinished perfection. [...]
Archive for July, 2010
Unfinished Perfection
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on July 31, 2010 | Comments Off
A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny. The file consists of [...]
A Food Chain Crisis in the World’s Oceans
Posted in Energy and Environment on July 30, 2010 | Comments Off
It is the starting point for our oceans’ food chain. But stocks of phytoplankton have decreased by 40 percent since 1950, potentially as a result of global warming. It is an astonishing collapse, say researchers, and may have dramatic consequences for both the oceans and for humans. A whale shark swims with its huge mouth [...]
Iran starts feeling heat
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on July 30, 2010 | Comments Off
“They [the United States and Israel] have decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months.“ – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, July 26 President Ahmadinejad has a penchant for the somewhat loony, as when last weekend he denounced Paul the Octopus, omniscient predictor of eight consecutive World Cup matches, [...]
The Missing Word in Our Afghanistan Strategy
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on July 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Neither the British prime minister nor the U.S. president is talking about ‘victory.’ What President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t say during last week’s joint news conference may have mattered more than what they did say. The omissions could lead to a grave setback in the war on terror and deadly [...]
WikiLeaks ‘Bastards’
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on July 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The website has endangered the lives of Afghan informants Julian Assange, the editor of the WikiLeaks website that on Monday released some 92,000 classified military documents, has told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that he “loved crushing bastards.” We wonder if the “bastards” he has in mind include the dozens of Afghan civilians named in [...]
The Limits of the Coded World
Posted in Living on July 26, 2010 | Comments Off
In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. [...]
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
Posted in Living on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged July 25 2010 on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
How prayer prevents drinking A recent study supports an interesting approach to curbing alcohol consumption: regular prayer. In surveys, people who reported praying more often also reported less alcohol consumption and fewer alcohol-related problems, and more prayer was associated with less consumption and fewer problems over the next several months. Of course, people who pray a [...]
Culture club
Posted in Living on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Does the nation’s culture need federal protection? In 2000, two years before he died, the legendary television comic Milton Berle sued NBC for losing track of 130 film reels of his early shows. A few years later, the Supreme Court upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, extending copyright terms to 70 years past the death [...]
The Art of the Deal as Entertainment
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Fans outside the site of LeBron James’s announcement this month. A few days back, when I asked a pal in Hollywood about a movie he had a hand in, he told me that the “project” came together as the result of its female star’s decision to drop her ineffectual old agent in favor of a [...]
A president tripped up by the spontaneous
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
If you want a handle on what ails the Obama administration (and who doesn’t, these days), try thinking about it as the “scripted” presidency. Barack Obama has been very good at following his mental teleprompter — he has passed health care and much of the rest of the legislative agenda he campaigned on, as his [...]
Verbed!
Posted in The Word, tagged July 25 2010 on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
What do these words and phrases have in common? Friend, Google, TiVo, log in, contact, barbecue, unlike, concept, text, Photoshop, leverage, party, Xerox, reference, architect, parent, improv, transition, diligence, host, chair, gift, heart, impact? They’ve all been declared–by someone, somewhere, whether a usage expert or just a self-appointed language cop–”not verbs.” It doesn’t matter whether [...]
‘Mad Men’-ese
Posted in On Language, tagged July 25 2010 on July 25, 2010 | Comments Off
As the fourth season of the AMC series “Mad Men” kicks off, some of the show’s fans are gearing up to play another round of a peculiar language game: trying to spot flaws in the meticulously constructed dialogue portraying 1960s Madison Avenue. No show in American television history, it is safe to say, has ever [...]
Chronicling the Holocaust from Inside the Ghetto
Posted in History on July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Roughly 50 men and women in the Warsaw Ghetto chose a special form of resistance. In a secret archive, they documented their path to doom for future generations, chronicling the Nazis’ crimes as they were being perpetrated. Jewish men, women and children being marched out of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1943. David Graber was [...]
VUK JEREMIC, Serbia’s foreign minister, looked ashen. He knew what was coming. Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia did not violate general international law, said Hisashi Owada, the president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, in a non-binding advisory opinion. Ten judges voted in favour of this ruling, with [...]
Rough justice
Posted in Law on July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal IN 2000 four Americans were charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran regulation that Honduras no longer enforces. They had fallen foul of the Lacey Act, which bars Americans [...]
Too many laws, too many prisoners
Posted in Law on July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved [...]
It’s a deal
Posted in Law on July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Trading prisoners in the Low Countries Dutch ease chock-a-block Belgium THE border between Belgium and the Netherlands can be easy to miss: a road sign here, a flagpole there, a change in the colour of cars’ licence plates. When it comes to penal policies, though, the neighbours differ sharply. The Dutch prison population has been [...]
Beware the lame duck
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Barack Obama’s considerable political capital, earned on Election Day 2008, is spent. Well spent, mind you, on the enactment of a highly ideological agenda of Obamacare, financial reform and a near-trillion-dollar stimulus that will significantly transform the country. But spent nonetheless. There’s nothing left with which to complete his social-democratic ambitions. This would have to [...]
Pepper… and Salt
Posted in Pepper and salt on July 21, 2010 | Comments Off
__________ Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704684604575381753003588266.html
Friendly Fire on Capitol Hill
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Democrats are saying unkind things about the White House. The president has himself to blame. Describing the White House last week, Congressional Democrats used words like “ineptness,” “neglected” and “disconcerting,” and phrases like “isn’t aggressive enough.” President Barack Obama has only himself to blame for these protests. Well, maybe more than just himself. White House [...]
The Liberal Dilemma
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Democratic Party’s capture by public unions and professional politicians is strangling much of liberalism’s agenda. Numerologists may have to be called in to explain the historic magnitude of the year 2010. After 60 years of doubling down on their spending, 2010 became the year governments from Greece to California hit the wall. (That Athens [...]
Richard Francis’s top 10 pubs in literature
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
After setting his latest novel in an English pub, Richard Francis drops in on his favourite literary drinking dens, from the Tabard in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn Plenty of drink, convivial company, proactive landlord, telling of tales … The Old Spot in Dursley, Gloucestershire. Richard Francis is the author [...]
Robin Ince’s top 10 truly bad books
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
From Sign of the Speculum to How to Marry the Man of your Choice, Robin Ince picks the best of the truly bad books he’s salvaged from jumble sales and skips up and down the country Renowned gnome fan and author, Terry Major-Ball, who died in 2007. Robin Ince is one of the UK’s most [...]
Michael Stanley’s top 10 African crime novels
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
The African crime writing duo pick the best books in their field, from established greats Agatha Christie and John Le Carré to newer names on the scene such as Kwei Quartey and Deon Meyer Spotted Hyena: body disposal expert? Ever since we started writing detective stories set in Africa (A Carrion Death and A Deadly [...]
Jennie Rooney’s top 10 women travellers in fiction
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
From eccentric spinster aunts to Alice in Wonderland, the novelist traces the steps of fiction’s most engaging female adventurers Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View. _____ Jennie Rooney’s new novel The Opposite of Falling, in which Ursula Bridgewater takes Thomas Cook’s famous new tour of America after her [...]
Melvin Burgess’s top 10 books written for teenagers
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
From supernatural big-hitters Pullman and Meyer to thrillers from Kevin Brooks and unforgettable imagery from David Almond, the author of Junk lists his favourite teen fiction Game-changer … Robert Pattinson, who plays a vampire in the films of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. _____ The author Melvin Burgess published his first book, The Cry of the Wolf, [...]
Mihir Bose’s top 10 football books
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
From Arthur Hopcraft to Nick Hornby, the award-winning journalist chooses the books that have improved our understanding of the beautiful game Gunning for it … Colin Firth in the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch Mihir Bose is an award-winning sports journalist with a career spanning more than 30 years as a sports writer for [...]
Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s top 10 20th-century gothic novels
Posted in Literature on July 20, 2010 | Comments Off
From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Carlos Ruiz Zafón chooses his favourite works in a fast-evolving genre Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike in the BBC adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. _____ Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born in Barcelona and is the author of The Shadow of the [...]
