Founders of company towns ranged from dreamy idealists to fast-buck Freddies. When Tennessee Ernie Ford gave the full weight of his bass-baritone to “Sixteen Tons” and boomed that he owed his soul to the company store, the phrase evoked images of stooped miners living in tar-paper shacks under what Hardy Green calls the “super-exploitative conditions [...]
Archive for August, 2010
The Labor of Living
Posted in Other on August 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on August 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Pier by Vona Groarke Filled with vitality and physical exuberance, this week’s bank holiday choice is that rare thing: a happy poem “Gulp cloud; / fling a jet-trail round your neck like a feather boa … “ This week’s choice, “Pier”, by one of today’s most interesting younger Irish poets, Vona Groarke, seems to be [...]
Time stands still in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 31, 2010 | Comments Off
Say what you will about the Arab world, it’s hard to earn its gratitude. President Obama went to Egypt and not Israel. He demanded that Israel cease adding new settlements in the West Bank. He treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a chilling disdain. For all of that, though, Obama’s approval rating in Arab countries [...]
The Paula Abdul Theory of Foreign Policy
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 30, 2010 | Comments Off
Self-esteem does not make for good policy (or singers). Is it better to be a sucker? Consider three examples where conventional wisdom tells us, in effect, that it is. Tomorrow, negotiations resume in Washington between Israelis and Palestinians. A fool’s gambit? Not at all, says U.S. envoy George Mitchell, who likes to say that, in [...]
Defining the Afghan Deadline Down
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 30, 2010 | Comments Off
The president’s advisers agree: We’re not leaving next July. If you are among those who think Barack Obama gives too many speeches, you may not be tuning in this evening when the president takes to the airwaves to speak to the American people about the end of the combat mission in Iraq. If you do [...]
Social Security Bait and Switch
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 30, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Harry, am I making this up?’ Yes, Mr. President, you are. Democrats are trying to keep control of Congress by scaring the wig off grandma with a phantom GOP plot against Social Security. That is not news. Social Security scare tactics have been regular campaign themes since FDR. President Obama’s unique contribution is to do [...]
The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it. Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of [...]
Contemplating Death From Above
Posted in Literature on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
In World War I, it was the trenches that captured the imagination of poets. In World War II, it was aerial combat. American B-29s bombing Yokohama, Japan, in 1945. Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is one of the few poems of World War II to have achieved wide renown. It reads in [...]
Jimmy Carter in Pyongyang
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
Back to the same old North Korean games. The first time Jimmy Carter travelled to North Korea, in 1994 to negotiate a nuclear deal, we wrote that “every demarche from Pyongyang will be entertained by other governments in light of the fear that North Korea wields a nuclear threat.” Fast forward 16 years to the [...]
Kirchner’s Assault on the Press
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
This week’s target: Argentina’s two most influential daily newspapers. “This begins the very clear dictatorial phase because one of the pillars of the republic is freedom of expression and the right of the people to be informed.” Elisa Carrió, Argentine opposition leader, Aug. 23 For almost a decade, loyalists to the Argentine republic have [...]
When the Killing Stopped
Posted in History on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
How the British tried to start again after the carnage of World War I. ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old”—we are all familiar with Laurence Binyon’s lament for the fallen of World War I. “The Great Silence” is the less-known story of the aftermath of that war: of those [...]
Ten Fallacies About Web Privacy
Posted in Computers on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
We are not used to the Internet reality that something can be known and at the same time no person knows it. Privacy on the Web is a constant issue for public discussion—and Congress is always considering more regulations on the use of information about people’s habits, interests or preferences on the Internet. Unfortunately, these [...]
Chopin’s Small Miracles
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
Despite their brevity, the Preludes loom large musically Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, “After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been [...]
Gastronomy
Posted in Other on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
If Irma S. Rombauer hadn’t used the phrase more than 70 years ago, the ideal title for this engaging little volume—half cookbook, half culinary sermon—might have been “The Joy of Cooking.” Ken Albala (a writer and history professor specializing in culinary matters) and Rosanna Nafziger (a Mennonite farm girl turned chef and editor) share a [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged August 29 2010 on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
When left is right Right is right, left is wrong. Because most people are righthanded, this bias has become customary. Thus, according to a recent paper, “the Latin words for right and left, dexter and sinister, form the roots of English words meaning skillful and evil, respectively,” and “according to Islamic doctrine, the left hand [...]
Un-rules
Posted in The Word, tagged August 29 2010 on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
Start the school year right: Forget these 10 language laws Another school year, another set of writing assignments: Students of all ages will soon be composing papers on summer vacations, the Chinese economy, or the heroines of Henry James. And beginners or veterans, these student writers all risk exposure to usage myths — bogus rules [...]
Ladies, gaga
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on August 29, 2010 | Comments Off
What drag is doing for women Some cast members from the show “RuPaul’s Drag U.” Maybe you’re shy, or a shut-in. Maybe you’re single and don’t want to be. Maybe all that truck driving, dog walking, kid raising, and company running has sapped your femininity. You’re a woman, and whatever the reason, you long to [...]
Ten of the best railway journeys
Posted in Literature on August 28, 2010 | Comments Off
“Midnight on the Great Western”, by Thomas Hardy Hardy’s poem is a vignette of Victorian public transport, preserved forever. By “the roof-lamp’s oily flame” a boy is seen half asleep in his third-class seat, his ticket stuck in his hat band, “Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, / Or whence he came”. Possession, by [...]
‘Jersey’ as a Nickname for New Jersey
Posted in On Language, tagged August 29 2010 on August 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Commenting on my column about beach lingo from the Jersey Shore and elsewhere, Gary Muldoon writes: “If someone from the Garden State comes from ‘Jersey,’ do those residents refer to someone from the Empire State as being from ‘York’?” “Jersey” as a nickname for New Jersey is an oddity: there’s no corresponding clipping of “New [...]
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
Posted in Language on August 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most [...]
Leo Strauss, Back and Better Than Ever
Posted in Other on August 27, 2010 | Comments Off
When President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, conspiracy theorists suspected that a puppet master was behind him. No, not Dick Cheney. The alleged puppeteer was the late Leo Strauss. The famous professor of political philosophy, who died in 1973, had many disciples in the Bush administration, and journalists had frequently [...]
Morality Check: When Fad Science Is Bad Science
Posted in Other on August 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Harvard University announced last Friday that its Standing Committee on Professional Conduct had found Marc Hauser, one of the school’s most prominent scholars, guilty of multiple counts of “scientific misconduct.” The revelation came after a three-year inquiry into allegations that the professor had fudged data in his research on monkey cognition. Since the studies were [...]
The Sincerest Form of Ridicule
Posted in Literature on August 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Henry James, Raymond Chandler, J.K. Rowling—no writer is safe from the literary satirist Literary parody is often described as verbal caricature. It’s true that both parody and caricature rely on the exaggeration of quirks and idiosyncrasies for satiric purposes. But their differences go deeper. Caricature plays on the monstrous for comic pay-off; it turns earlobes [...]
The 1.6% Recovery
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion on August 27, 2010 | Comments Off
The results of the Obama economic experiment are coming in. To no one’s surprise except perhaps Vice President Joe Biden’s, second quarter economic growth was revised down yesterday to 1.6% from the prior estimate of 2.4%, which was down from first quarter growth of 3.7%, which was down from the 2009 fourth quarter’s 5%. Economic [...]
The stuff of life
Posted in Literature on August 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant new novel studies the planet, happiness and marriage Freedom. By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 576 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; £20. IT WAS John DeForest, a writer of the civil-war period, who defined the Great American Novel in an 1868 essay for the Nation as “painting the American soul within the [...]
‘Women Aren’t Chimpanzees’
Posted in Living on August 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Badinter (left) is seen with feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in a 1983 photo. Beauvoir believed a liberated woman could not be a mother. “The current generation of young women is made up of the daughters of the feminists of the 1970s,” Badinter says. “They don’t want to be like their mothers — torn between [...]
Special Forces Ratchet Up Fight Against Taliban
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Aggressive Tactics in Afghanistan US Army Special Operations Forces: Progress reported in fight against Taliban Through nighttime attacks and drone strikes, special forces led by the United States have massively ratcheted up their hunt for Taliban. In the past three months alone, the highly secretive forces have eliminated 365 insurgent commanders. The international troops in [...]
The last refuge of a liberal
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the [...]
We Just Don’t Understand
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Americans look at the president and see a stranger. All presidents take vacations, and all are criticized for it. It’s never the right place, the right time. Ronald Reagan went to the ranch, George W. Bush to Crawford, both got knocked. Bill Clinton even poll-tested a vacation site and still was criticized. But Martha’s Vineyard—elite, [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on August 26, 2010 | Comments Off
A Trace of Wings by Edwin Morgan A very unusual elegy this time, to Basil Bunting, which will also serve as a tribute to the vivacious inventiveness of its author Edwin Morgan at his home in Glasgow in 2003. The mood of elegy does not have to be Gray. This week’s poem laments the death [...]
