WHEN my dad, Allen Funt, produced “Candid Microphone” back in the mid-1940s, he used a clever ruse to titillate listeners. A few times per show he’d edit out an innocent word or phrase and replace it with a recording of a sultry woman’s voice saying, “Censored.” Audiences always laughed at the thought that something dirty [...]
Archive for October, 2010
Too Funny for Words
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
We
Posted in On Language, tagged October 3 2010 on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Theodore Rockwell, who served as technical director for the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-propulsion program in the 1950s and ’60s, shared a telling anecdote about his onetime boss, the famously irascible Adm. Hyman G. Rickover. “One time he caught me using the editorial we, as in ‘we will get back to you by. . . .’ ” [...]
Why So Many People Can’t Make Decisions
Posted in Living on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped. Seeing the world as black and white, in which choices seem clear, or shades of gray [...]
A Wealth Of Ideas
Posted in History on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
A mind that ranged over politics, law and ethics—and produced the definitive defense of free markets. Having dined with Adam Smith on a number of occasions, Samuel Johnson once described him “as dull a dog as he had ever met with.” Smith’s biographers might be inclined to agree. The most celebrated political economist in history [...]
Dr Hawking’s bright idea
Posted in Physical sciences on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Mimicking black holes A long-predicted phenomenon has turned up in an unexpected place IN 1974 Stephen Hawking, pictured right, had a startling theoretical insight about black holes—those voracious eaters of matter and energy from whose gravitational clutches not even light can escape. He predicted that black holes should not actually be black. Instead, because of [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged October 3 2010 on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
What makes people vote Although an important role for the government is helping poor people, the poor themselves are less likely to vote than more affluent citizens. Some of this may be due to transportation or job constraints, but an experiment with public housing residents in Boston before the 2007 municipal elections confirms that motivation [...]
Banned Words Week
Posted in The Word, tagged October 3 2010 on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Why people blacklist This past week was, for those of you who missed it, Banned Books Week. Since 1982, booksellers, librarians, and readers have spent the last week of September drawing attention to the problem of censorship and book bans, by creating displays of challenged books, holding “read-outs” (where authors read from their challenged books), [...]
A Man for All Factions
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 4, 2010 | Comments Off
For decades, the Democratic Party was torn by civil war. On one side was the liberal left — populist in economics and dovish on foreign policy, in favor of lavish spending programs and suspicious of big business, and hostile to any idea that seemed to give an inch to the conservatives. On the other were [...]
Learning to ‘Pack a Punch’ in 150 Pages
Posted in Literature on October 3, 2010 | Comments Off
Shortly before finishing his most recent novel, “The Humbling” (2009), Philip Roth sat down with a yellow legal pad and drew up a list of the historical events he had lived through, knew well and hadn’t yet written about. One of the words he wrote down was “polio.” Several days later, he glanced at the [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on October 3, 2010 | Comments Off
A Mind of Winter by Martha Kapos This time, a striking contemporary poem whose apparent clarity conceals some intriguing mystery as it pays homage to Wallace Stevens Cold thoughts … a window covered with ice. This week’s poem, “A Mind of Winter”, is by Martha Kapos, and comes from her most recent collection, Supreme Being [...]
Cathy Cassidy’s top 10 stories about sisters
Posted in Literature on October 3, 2010 | Comments Off
Sisterly love … still from Sophia Coppola’s film of The Virgin Suicides (1999)Bestselling children’s author Cathy Cassidy’s books include Dizzy, Driftwood, Indigo Blue, Scarlett, Sundae Girl, Lucky Star, Gingersnaps and Angel Cake. Her latest novel, Cherry Crush, is the first book in her new series for over-nines, The Chocolate Box Girls, about five very different [...]
Heard of Any Great Playwrights Lately?
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
The days when the national media turned high-culture figures into mainstream stars are long past Sometimes a passing comment can be more telling than a considered one. In reviewing the recent New York premiere of “Me, Myself & I,” Edward Albee’s latest play, I remarked that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is “the only one [...]
The Twister of 2010
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
America’s political landscape will never be the same. On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., I found a note prominently displayed in my hotel room warning of the possibility of “extreme weather” including “tornadic activity.” The clunky euphemism was no doubt meant to soften or obscure what they were obliged to communicate: There may be [...]
Ditch Your Laptop, Dump Your Boyfriend
Posted in Living on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
Advice for freshmen from the people who actually grade their papers and lead their class discussions. College is your chance to see what you’ve been missing, both in the outside world and within yourself. Use this time to explore as much as you can. Take classes in many different subjects before picking your major. Try [...]
When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story
Posted in Politics on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
FIFTY years ago today, the “Great Debate” between Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican nominee for president, and Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, attracted 70 million viewers — the largest audience in American history for any political event. Six myths have persisted throughout the innumerable reports on this historic confrontation. As someone [...]
Kafka’s Last Trial
Posted in Literature on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
An undated photograph of Franz Kafka. During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . [...]
Democrats and the Health-Reform Albatross
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
By making so many misleading claims, the president created an army of opposition. ‘Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Karl Rove, they’re all warning you of the horrendous impact if you support this legislation,” President Barack Obama said in March about his health reform, but “I am actually confident . . . that it will end up [...]
Knowing it all
Posted in Religion on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
God, science and knowledge A counterblast to Stephen Hawking The End of Discovery: Are We Approaching the Boundaries of the Knowable? By Russell Stannard. OUP; 228 pages; $24.95 and £14.99. REPORTS of the death of science have been greatly exaggerated—at least, that has proved to be the case so far. A British physicist, Lord Kelvin, [...]
In the Habitable Zone
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Space on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
A planet orbiting a star causes a slight disturbance in the star’s rotation, the effect of the gravitational tug between the star and the planet. Astronomers have been studying the wobbling of stars for a couple of decades, in hopes of finding an exoplanet — a planet beyond our solar system — that might offer [...]
Why is Obama sending troops to Afghanistan?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009, commander in chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American withdrawal will begin after 18 months. Astonishing. A surge of troops — overall, Obama has tripled our [...]
A Literary Revolution
Posted in Literature on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
Kafka knew that ‘to be modern is to know that some things can no longer be done.’ The French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) once said that he could never write a novel because sooner or later he would find himself setting down such a sentence as “The marquise went out at five o’clock.” Why did [...]
Feasts for Foodies
Posted in Living on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
Two new books showcase the world’s top chefs It’s old news now that the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià for four years ran the “World’s Best Restaurant”—until his El Bulli lost the title last April to an equally unlikely candidate, René Redzepi’s Copenhagen nosherie called Noma. The title may be meaningless, but it does point to [...]
Reflections on the American Landscape
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
During the Jacksonian era of the 1820s and 1830s, narrative scenes of everyday life were in the ascendancy in the U.S., reflecting the rise of the democratic spirit and the cult of the individual. A continuation of that sensibility remains evident in the three fishing figures in Robert S. Duncanson’s painting “Blue Hole, Little Miami [...]
Trolls and Tribulations
Posted in Literature on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
A newly translated collection of short stories from the late Tove Jansson explores the themes of solitude and aging. What is Finland’s most distinctive export? Nokia, Sibelius—or the Moomins? There is a strong case for the last. The late Tove Jansson is certainly best known as the inventor of these gentle, hospitable, thoughtful creatures with [...]
The Genius of the Tinkerer
Posted in Other on October 2, 2010 | Comments Off
The secret to innovation is combining odds and ends, writes Steven Johnson. In the year following the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight neonatal incubators from international relief organizations. Several years later, when an MIT fellow named Timothy Prestero visited the local hospital, all eight were out of order, the victim of [...]
