Did Lisa Birnbach’s original ‘Handbook’ drive people lazy? It is one of the great mysteries of publishing that, for decades after the astonishing success of the 1980 paperback, “The Official Preppy Handbook,” there was no follow-up. The gently comical tribute to the ways of the WASP not only did boffo box office itself but boosted [...]
Archive for September, 2010
Preppy Pitfall: All That Madras, Not Enough Effort.
Posted in Living on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Our Love Affair With the Fairs
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
State fairs embody our roots in agriculture, entrepreneurship and rabble-rousing. So the summer fades and our children return to school—and this feels at once like a liberation and a reminder that we have only a few years with them. The fall leaves me melancholy, but thankfully there is perhaps our most beloved family tradition, the [...]
The Obama Heyday Is Over
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
With so many Democrats running against the president’s agenda in the midterm, change will come in the next Congress, regardless of which party is in control. Barack Obama hit the campaign trail this week to resurrect some of that hopey-changey stuff and to complain that his critics talk about him “like a dog.” Turns out [...]
Your move, Mr. Abbas
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
The prospects are dim but the process is right. The Obama administration is to be commended for structuring the latest rounds of Middle East talks correctly. Finally, we’re leaving behind interim agreements, of which the most lamentable were the Oslo accords of 1993. The logic then was that issues so complicated could only be addressed [...]
As midterms loom, Obama has lost his rhetorical touch
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Even Democrats who agree with President Obama’s ideology, respect his tenacity and admire his deliberative manner have begun to whisper: Maybe he isn’t a very good politician. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who is genetically incapable of whispering, puts it bluntly: “Ironically, the best communicator I ever saw in a campaign has turned out to be [...]
Russian Spy Anna Chapman Finds Celebrity at Home
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on September 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Back to Russia, With Love Russia’s new cover girl. Anna Chapman in a photo spread in the men’s magazine Zhara, or “Heat.” She has been compared to Mata Hari, a Dutch exotic dancer who was executed by the French during World War I, after being accused of spying for Germany. Former Russian spy Anna Chapman, [...]
Healthy Living, For Two
Posted in Health on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
In “Origins,” Annie Murphy Paul explores current scientific thinking about how our lives are shaped by what happens to us in utero. Tobacco, heavy drinking, illegal drugs, depression: We seem to grasp that these aren’t healthy for anyone, let alone a pregnant woman. But just what effect do the things that women inhale, consume and [...]
The Outlook Dims for Democrats
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
A summer of polling data suggest the GOP can take the House. With the midterm election less than two months away, all signs point to a punishing defeat for Democrats in the House of Representatives. Since July 1, there have been 111 polls released on U.S. House races in 79 districts. Some were commissioned by [...]
A President’s Class War
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Where on the income scale does Mr. Obama divide the country between us and them? Barack Obama may be the most embittered American president any of us has experienced. Read the text of that Labor Day speech he gave in Milwaukee. “Anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well [...]
Charlie Higson’s top 10 horror books
Posted in Literature on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Stamping images in readers’ imaginations … Charlie Higson surrounded by zombies. As well as making becoming a household name for his work as a writer and actor in comedy shows such as The Fast Show, Charlie Higson has had a parallel and these days just as stellar career as a writer. After winning acclaim for [...]
Obama vs. Boehner
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
How worried are Democrats? V-E-R-Y. Let’s take it from the top. President Obama spent Labor Day reminding Americans that he’s the cool one, the “Yes, we can” one, the rolled-up-sleeves one. He never named Ohio Republican Rep. John Boehner explicitly, but he clearly was aiming for the man who, if things go as they seem [...]
Salvation in Small Steps
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on September 7, 2010 | Comments Off
With the collapse of various ideologies and totalizing nostrums, human rights became ever more important in world affairs. Brendan Simms reviews Mr. Moyn’s “The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.” In their classic essay collection, “The Invention of Tradition” (1983), the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger showed how many features of British society that [...]
Politics and the Cult of Sentimentality
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on September 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Wilde said that sentimentality is the desire to have the luxury of emotion without paying for it. When, as in my case, you have identified what you think is a social trend—the increasing sentimentality of public discourse, which brings with it disastrous practical consequences—you begin to see examples of it everywhere. On Thursday of last [...]
Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on September 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Lycidas by John Milton This time, a remarkable supple kind of pastoral that makes room for a number of unexpected and daring fusions Complex passions … John Milton. Dr Johnson, while recognising Milton’s genius, took a famously dim view of this week’s poem. “Such is the power of reputation justly acquired that its blaze drives [...]
‘The Roma Are EU Citizens — Everywhere in the European Union’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on September 6, 2010 | Comments Off
The World from Berlin Demostrators protest against the French government’s immigration policy in the western city of Nantes on September 4. France’s expulsion of Roma people could be copied by other governments unless it is vigorously condemned by the European public, warn German media commentators. They argue that Brussels is right to voice its misgivings [...]
Mystery and Evidence
Posted in Religion on September 6, 2010 | Comments Off
There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: “And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?” Russell replied: “I will say: [...]
Paranoid About Paranoia
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 6, 2010 | Comments Off
Last Wednesday, a man named James Lee entered the headquarters of the Discovery Channel with explosives strapped to his body, took three hostages at gunpoint, and waited for his demands to be met. A foe of population growth, Lee had apparently decided that shows like “Kate Plus Eight” and “19 Kids and Counting” were pushing [...]
That ’70s Feeling
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion, Living on September 6, 2010 | Comments Off
TODAY we celebrate the American labor force, but this year’s working-class celebrity hero made his debut almost a month ago. Steven Slater, a flight attendant for JetBlue, ended his career by cursing at his passengers over the intercom and grabbing a couple of beers before sliding down the emergency-evacuation chute — and into popular history. [...]
Boxers, Briefs and Books
Posted in Literature, Living on September 6, 2010 | Comments Off
I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his [...]
Correggio’s Conundrum
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
His pagan room for an abbess defies easy analysis On a hot summer afternoon, Parma looks like a Giorgio de Chirico painting, its elegant squares and clean, flat, narrow streets devoid of human life. Sunlight intersects with shade at unexpected angles. But far from being Cole Porter’s “stingy, dingy menace,” Parma—the world’s ham-and-cheese capital, in [...]
Video Game Tort: You Made Me Play You
Posted in Law on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
A federal judge in Hawaii ruled last month that a man claiming to be addicted to a videogame can sue the game’s maker for gross negligence in not warning him he could become a joystick junkie. Craig Smallwood alleges in his lawsuit that, as a result of playing the online game “Lineage II,” he has [...]
Why God Did Not Create the Universe
Posted in Religion on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have [...]
How to shrink a city
Posted in Living on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline. Since cities first got big enough to require urban planning, its practitioners have focused on growth. From imperial Rome to 19th-century Paris and Chicago and up through modern-day Beijing, the duty of city planners and administrators has [...]
Ghost fleet
Posted in Living on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
Cars come in nearly any color we can imagine. So why do we buy them in white? Does any citizen on this planet enjoy a wider array of choice than the American picking the color of a new car? To browse a dealership is to be confronted with a spectrum of bewildering creativity, from Mitsubishi’s [...]
Turning the page
Posted in The Word, tagged September 5 2010 on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
New words and the dictionary of the future The end of summer must be the perfect moment to put out a dictionary-related press release: There’s not much other news, and everyone’s thinking about the new school year approaching. So it’s no surprise that the recent announcement that 2,000 new words and phrases have been added [...]
Superbroke, Superfrugal, Superpower?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on September 5, 2010 | Comments Off
In recent years, I have often said to European friends: So, you didn’t like a world of too much American power? See how you like a world of too little American power — because it is coming to a geopolitical theater near you. Yes, America has gone from being the supreme victor of World War [...]
The Meaning of ‘Man Up’
Posted in On Language, tagged September 5 2010 on September 4, 2010 | Comments Off
The New York Mets lost their closer Francisco Rodriguez, a k a K-Rod, to season-ending surgery on a torn thumb ligament last month. But really the Mets lost him to two simple words: “man up.” According to The New York Daily News, that’s what Carlos Peña, the father of Rodriguez’s girlfriend, told him outside the [...]
Ten of the best religious zealots in literature
Posted in Literature on September 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Solomon Eagle Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year imagined the Great Plague of 1665 so vividly that the first readers thought it a genuine record. One of the religious “enthusiasts” inspired by the calamity is “the famous Solomon Eagle”, who “went about denouncing the Judgement on the City in a frightful manner; sometimes [...]
Ephemera in Full
Posted in Other on September 3, 2010 | Comments Off
The Sage of Baltimore was not always so sagacious H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) is a revered figure in the history of American letters, and understandably so. But after enduring the heavy weather of these two Library of American volumes—a gathering of Mencken essays and journalism originally published between 1919 and 1927 in a series of books [...]
