Walmart makes us fat One cause of increasing obesity is cheap food. Therefore, it should be no coincidence that the largest company in the world — whose motto is “Save money. Live better.” — may contribute to obesity. And, indeed, the geographic expansion of Walmart stores can explain 10.5 percent of the rise in American [...]
Archive for November, 2010
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged November 14 2010 on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Obama=Bush?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
President Obama isn’t the new Carter, but he just might be the new (first) Bush Months before Election Day, the name of Jimmy Carter had assumed an incantatory power among observers of politics. President Obama’s supporters began to fret that his presidency was declining as Carter’s did, while his opponents salivated at the prospect, as [...]
Packing off politics
Posted in Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
ON SUNDAY Poles will elect a slew of mayors, municipal and regional councillors. They will choose from among professional politicians, experienced local hands and celebrities with a desire to dabble in politics (the picture above depicts a pop starlet who touts herself as “beautiful, independent and competent”). This is the third such election since the centre-right government of [...]
The Heart of ‘Darkness’
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Under an early autumn sky here in central New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen pointed north toward nearby Holmdel, where 33 years ago he began recording “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” likely the most important album of his notable career. Then, turning east, he said, “And I recorded ‘Nebraska’ five miles that way.” His birthplace, Long [...]
The Headache That Wouldn’t Go Away
Posted in Health on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
“My arm — something is biting my arm!” The 26-year-old woman struggled to sit up in bed. What’s wrong? her husband asked, alarmed and suddenly wide awake. His wife didn’t seem to hear him. Suddenly, her whole body began to jerk. Although he had never seen a seizure, the young man knew immediately that this [...]
Mental health is the new antiabortion battleground. But the science is all wrong.
Posted in Living on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The latest war on abortion is being fought less over women’s bodies than over their minds. In the past few years, under the banner of “a woman’s right to know,” a number of states have passed laws mandating that women seeking abortions be told that going ahead with the procedure would expose them to mental [...]
He Paints the Past
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Most of America’s greatest moments occurred in war,” said James Dietz, a Seattle artist who primarily paints scenes of World War II, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a terrible thought—but for history painters, who look in their art to capture the past, a battle scene makes a better picture dramatically and compositionally than a view of [...]
Georgia to U.S.: ‘Don’t Tread on Me’
Posted in History on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Nov. 9, 1860 Across the country, the day’s headlines blazed with reports of Southerners’ response to Lincoln’s election. Perhaps most disturbing to many Americans, though thrilling to others, was news of a mass meeting in Savannah, Ga., the previous afternoon. Thousands of citizens – the largest gathering that the city had ever seen, newspapers said [...]
Bush Agonistes? Not Quite
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
In an interview, the former president makes the case for his ‘freedom agenda’ and defends his record on the economy and spending. The former leader of the free world sits in a comfy chair wearing Crocs. As twilight sets in, George W. Bush keeps one eye on a muted World Series game. “That’s what I’m [...]
A Short History of Midterm Elections
Posted in Politics on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
If the past is indeed prologue, then Republicans shouldn’t get too cocky. A popular and charismatic president in a time of great economic distress has large majorities in both the House and Senate. He tries to push through Congress a highly unpopular measure that, in the opinion of many, would have fundamentally altered the nature [...]
Sick of This Text: ‘Sorry I’m Late’
Posted in Living on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
I recently made plans to meet a good friend for dinner. We picked our favorite Italian place in Brooklyn and both swore we’d be there at 8. At 8:05, as I arrived at the restaurant, my pal sent a text saying she was running late and was just leaving her office—half an hour away. She [...]
Writing wrongs
Posted in Other on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
THE politics of the latest attacks by Hindu nationalists on Indian authors is not terribly hard to divine. One extremist bunch, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an outfit often banned by India’s government, has threatened Arundhati Roy, a prize-winning Indian novelist turned political activist. Ms Roy’s crime? That in recent weeks she dared to speak [...]
The Last Ordinary Day
Posted in History on November 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Nov. 1, 1860 Seven score and 10 years ago, a little Pennsylvania town drowsed in the waning light of an Indian summer. Almost nothing had happened lately that the two local newspapers found worthy of more than a cursory mention. The fall harvest was in; grain prices held steady. A new ice cream parlor had [...]
Too Good to Check
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Other on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before [...]
Accountability for Torture (in Britain)
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The contrast could not be more distressing. The British government has decided to pay former detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, tens of millions of dollars in compensation and conduct an independent investigation into its role in the mistreatment of prisoners. The United States still operates the Guantánamo camp, with no end in sight. None of [...]
Boston Butterfly
Posted in Photo galleries on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
A butterfly perches on the screen window of the butterfly room in the Museum of Science in Boston, USA. In the background the Charles River and the Boston skyline. The collection includes butterflies and moths from all over the world. __________ Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,729710,00.html
Don’t Get Cocky, GOP
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Obama is weak, but it is always difficult to defeat a sitting president. It has been a brutal month for President Obama. The historic electoral rebuke delivered to his party was followed at the G-20 meeting by a public rebuff of the Federal Reserve’s QE2 program and the administration’s handling of the China currency issue. [...]
Maxim Jakubowski’s top 10 crime locations
Posted in Literature on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
LA story … Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in the film version of The Big Sleep. _____ Maxim Jakubowski is a writer and editor who was the Guardian’s crime fiction reviewer for 10 years. He has edited anthologies of noir tales about London, Paris and Rome and is currently working on a Venice volume. Following [...]
Anna Shevchenko’s top 10 novels set in Moscow
Posted in Literature on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Exaggerated and distorted through fiction … Moscow through a rainy window. Anna Shevchenko studied at the National University, Kiev, before moving to the UK to study at Cambridge University. A linguist and international negotiator, she speaks seven languages and is the author of two cultural guides to Russia and Ukraine. Her first novel, Bequest, is [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Apollo’s Archaic Torso translated by Sarah Stutt A Greek statue of Apollo at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. _____ This week’s poem is a new English translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archäischer Torso Apollos”. “Apollo’s Archaic Torso” is by a young Yorkshire writer, Sarah Stutt, who recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The Black Guitar by Paul Henry Striking an emotional chord … The Black Guitar by Paul Henry. _____ The late UA Fanthorpe said an interesting thing when she described Paul Henry as a poet who “gets the maximum effect from minimum language”. Her words are quoted on the back of his recent New and Selected [...]
Fighting Bullying With Babies
Posted in Living on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Imagine there was a cure for meanness. Well, maybe there is. Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated New York Times article that focused on “mean girl” bullying in kindergarten. [...]
Does Her Face Foretell Her Fate?
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Nothing holds our attention like a human face. So necessary is it for us to “read” faces that our brains evolved two separate neural systems specialized to help—one to recognize whose face it is, and the other to interpret its expression. It is therefore not surprising that when Stephen Pinson, the New York Public Library’s [...]
Nazi Degenerate Art Rediscovered in Berlin
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Photo galleries on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Buried in a Bombed-Out Cellar The works were thought to have been lost forever. Eleven sculptures, all of them shunned by the Nazis for being un-German, have been found during subway construction work in the heart of Berlin. But how did they get there? Digging new subway lines in Europe is no easy task. It’s not [...]
A Buffet Of Period Pieces
Posted in Living on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
‘I have created this book as a literary amuse-bouche,” food historian William Woys Weaver says in “Culinary Ephemera,” but his collection of period American recipes, labels, ads, menus, matchbooks and much else is more likely to sate an appetite than whet it. The 352 color plates, accompanied by informed, diverting text, cover everything from food-oriented [...]
A Slave Ship in New York
Posted in History on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
New York, Nov. 4, 1860 If you had risen early on that Sunday morning, you probably would have ventured out to marvel at the wreckage left by the past night’s storm. Trees had toppled; shop signs lay smashed on the cobblestones. All along the wharves of lower Manhattan, ships had lost spars and rigging. And [...]
A Lincoln Photograph – and a Mystery
Posted in History on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Washington, Nov. 6, 1860 There is no photograph of Lincoln from the day he was elected president – nor any of voters lining up to cast their ballots, nor of citizens hearing the results of a contest that would change their country forever. Newspapers did not run pictures in those days, and what we think [...]
Sarkozy Draws Ire Over Media Spying Claims
Posted in Politics on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Last spring the domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI, were asked to investigate who had spread rumors about Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, having extramarital affairs. The justification given for the operation was that there was a suspected foreign plot to discredit the French president in the runup to the G-20 summit. French President Nicolas [...]
The loan arranger
Posted in Economy and business on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
AMAZON.COM says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto. An oversight, I’m sure. Barnes [...]
Pepper…and Salt
Posted in Pepper and salt on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
__________ Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805704575594982560931798.html
