Think you know Sarah Palin? The former Alaska governor has been in the spotlight ever since John McCain named her as his running mate on Aug. 29, 2008. Yet, while practically everybody has an opinion about Palin, not all of those opinions are grounded in reality. Many of them are based more on a “Saturday [...]
Archive for October, 2010
Five myths about Sarah Palin
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Savagery in the East
Posted in History on October 18, 2010 | Comments Off
How Stalin and then Hitler turned the borderlands of Eastern Europe into killing fields The story of World War II, like that of most wars, usually gets told by the victors. Diplomatic and military accounts are set largely in the West and star the morally upright Allies—the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union—in battles against fascism. [...]
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
Posted in Health on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Psychiatric diagnosis The way diseases of the psyche are diagnosed is changing rapidly. Doctors are struggling to keep up WHAT good is a diagnostic tool if it is too complicated for doctors to use? This is the dilemma facing psychiatry. In the United States the release back in February of a draft version of the [...]
Magic by Numbers
Posted in Other on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
I RECENTLY wound up in the emergency room. Don’t worry, it was probably nothing. But to treat my case of probably nothing, the doctor gave me a prescription for a week’s worth of antibiotics, along with the usual stern warning about the importance of completing the full course. I understood why I needed to complete [...]
The road that built us
Posted in History on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
How the Post Road wrote New England’s history Without knowing it, you’ve almost surely walked it or driven it, maybe on your way to the grocery store in Wayland, or a restaurant in the South End. Since it became America’s first mail route back in 1673, the Boston Post Road has connected Boston to New [...]
A new lens
Posted in The Word, tagged October 17 2010 on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The rise of ‘optic,’ and how we love shiny toys The trouble with being a lexicographer is that you’re often less interested in the point someone is making than in the language they use to make it. This happened to me not long ago when I was listening to the morning news. “We’re seeing this [...]
Monterrey’s Habit
Posted in Living on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
INVISIBLE paths to the United States, it seems, have always passed through Monterrey. People and their merchandise come and go via paved roads and dusty lanes, but also through the famous little walkways, somewhere between manicured and overgrown, that are hidden among the thickets of underbrush. Increasingly, Mexico has a hidden drug problem — but [...]
Ground Zero in Sinaloa
Posted in Living on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
FOUR years ago Mexico invented a civil war: the government decided to confront the seven major drug cartels. The army was sent into the streets, mountains and country paths. Even the navy was on alert. Here in Sinaloa, the western state where the modern drug trade began, poorly armed and ill-outfitted federal and state police [...]
Tijuana Reclaimed
Posted in Living on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
THERE are two Tijuanas: that of the locals, and that of the rest. The true Tijuana belongs only to the oldest families, the grandparents and great-grandparents of Tijuana. The view from outside, on the other hand, tends to come into focus through fantasy, stereotype and cliché. But the outside world helped create Tijuana. In the [...]
The Walls of Puebla
Posted in Living on October 17, 2010 | Comments Off
HOW has life in Mexico changed under the rising tide of drug violence? It’s difficult to say; it is what it is. It goes on. For long stretches of time, it is easy to forget about the violence. But then reality breaks through, and it becomes once again impossible to ignore. All my life I [...]
William Fotheringham’s top 10 cycling novels
Posted in Literature on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Spoke words … the Tour de France. William Fotheringham is the Guardian’s cycling columnist and the author of Cyclopedia: It’s All About the Bike, which is published by Yellow Jersey Press. “Two-wheeled life has proved a rich vein for publishers in the last 10 years, in tandem with the rapid expansion of the sport throughout [...]
Ten of the best taxis in literature
Posted in Literature on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Narrator Jake Barnes first becomes intimate with Lady Brett Ashley, the liberated Englishwoman whom he loves but cannot sexually fulfil, in the back of a taxi driving round Paris. Hemingway’s novel ends in the back of another taxi, driving through Madrid, with Jake and Brett discussing what could [...]
The Sound of Spirit
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Emigrating from the Soviet Union to the West in January 1980 with his wife, Nora, and their two small sons, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was stopped by border police at the Brest railroad station for a luggage search. “We had only seven suitcases, full of my scores, records and tapes,” he recalled recently. “They [...]
The Elusive Small-House Utopia
Posted in Living on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Every year, in conjunction with a big trade show, the magazine Builder creates something it calls its “concept home.” The house is an exhibition on a theme — the 2004 edition, for example, was called the Ultimate Family Home — but also a commercial venture. Attendees of the International Builders’ Show can walk through a [...]
Truthiness
Posted in On Language, tagged October 17 2010 on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Around 4 p.m. on Oct. 17, 2005, Stephen Colbert was searching for a word. Not just any word, but one that would fit the blowhard persona that he was presenting that night on the premiere episode of Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.” He once described his faux-pundit character as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot,” and [...]
What the Tea Partiers Really Want
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The passion behind the populist insurgency is less about liberty than a particularly American idea of karma. What do the tea partiers really want? The title of a recent book by two of the movement’s leaders offers an answer: “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.” The authors, Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, write that [...]
Everyman’s Gun
Posted in Other on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Sheer numbers have made the AK-47 the world’s primary tool for killing The AK-47 is the most numerous and widely distributed weapon in history, with a name and appearance that are instantly recognized worldwide. Designed in the late 1940s for the Soviet Army, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 47 (“Automatic of Kalashnikov 1947″) became the universal weapon [...]
An Age of Creative Destruction
Posted in Economy and business, History on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.” Thus Cornelius Vanderbilt writing to business partners who had exploited his absence to gain control of one of his companies. He was as good as his word. The nature of both ruin and success is [...]
The World Turned Upside Down
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The Marx Brothers’ comedy is driven and gentle and chaotic and anarchic, and somehow bawdy and wholesome at the same time. It’s also all about the American Dream. I’m always on the lookout for DVDs for the kids and me, and it’s always old comedies. It seems every car wash in Southern California has displays [...]
Five Best Books: Terror in America
Posted in Literature on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Death in the Haymarket By James Green (2006) A century ago the “anarchist bomb-thrower” was a widely feared specter in American politics. In “Death in the Haymarket,” labor historian James Green explores the reality behind the image. Delivering a gripping account of Americans’ first major encounter with anarchist violence. On May 4, 1886, a bomb [...]
Another Quiet American
Posted in History on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
On May 23, 1950, the FBI arrested Harry Gold, a 49-year-old chemist who lived with his father in Philadelphia. The FBI accused him of being a Soviet espionage agent—the man who, as a courier, literally gave the Russians the secrets of the atomic bomb. Though other Soviet spies from that era—Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel [...]
Viva Chile! They Left No Man Behind.
Posted in Living on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A show of competence and determination inspires the world. Chile! Viva Chile! If I had your flag, I would wave it today from the roof of my building, and watch my New York neighbors smile, nod and wave as they walked by. What a thing Chile has done. They say on TV, “Chile needed this.” [...]
The Last Reunion
Posted in Living on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Even in the age of Twitter, face-to-face interaction is what makes life worth living. In 1986, some former classmates and I organized an informal 40th reunion for the graduating class of our public grammar school in Chicago. We were in our fifties back then, and many of our careers were going well. Most of us [...]
Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party Movement
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Our universities haven’t taught much political history for decades. No wonder so many progressives have disdain for the principles that animated the Federalist debates. Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and [...]
He Captured Unfettered Illusionism
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
In the late morning hours of Oct. 12, 1654, a cataclysmic explosion of gunpowder magazines decimated the northeast quadrant of the peaceful Dutch city of Delft, leveling its modest houses, damaging its elegant churches and killing hundreds of its inhabitants. Among the victims was the 32-year-old painter Carel Fabritius (1622-1654). Although his art would be [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Bethsabe’s Song by George Peele This time, an Elizabethan reading of a Biblical story hot with dangerous sensuality Detail from Bathsheba with David’s Letter by Rembrandt van Rijn (1654). George Peele (1557-1596) was a gifted playwright, whose work some critics consider prepared the way for Shakespeare. Contemporaries praised the effortless smoothness of his blank verse. [...]
A Visit to Germany’s First-Ever Hitler Exhibition
Posted in History on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Führer Show The German History Museum in Berlin will open an extensive exhibition on Adolf Hitler on Friday, the first of its kind in postwar Germany. On Friday, the German History Museum is opening postwar Germany’s first-ever comprehensive exhibition on Adolf Hitler. Curators went out of their way to avoid creating an homage — yet they [...]
How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe
Posted in History on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Neolithic Immigration An excavation of a Linear Pottery village in Bavaria New research has revealed that agriculture came to Europe amid a wave of immigration from the Middle East during the Neolithic period. The newcomers won out over the locals because of their sophisticated culture, mastery of agriculture — and their miracle food, milk. Wedged [...]
A Kimjongunia would smell as sweet
Posted in Other on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
SOMETIMES there are Kimilsungia exhibitions. Sometimes there are Kimjongilia ones. Citizens of Pyongyang are also treated to combined Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia shows. One such got underway at the beginning of this month, at the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Exhibition House: innumerable pots filled with the same two kinds of plant, a monotony alleviated only by a guide’s prediction [...]
Virtual lemmings
Posted in Living on October 16, 2010 | Comments Off
HUMANS are a gregarious lot. We appreciate company. And we appreciate our company appreciating us. One way to preserve this mutual appreciation is to emulate others. This gives rise to trends or, in a less charitable turn of phrase, herd mentality. We appear to be wired to find all manner of fads psychologically irresistible. Advertisers [...]
