My Mom used to say, “When you’re blue, wear red.” America took that advice on Election Day, and you can color Kevin happy. My conservative brother celebrated by doing his year-end political letter early. Here is his tour d’horizon: As a semichastened Barack Obama appeared at the press conference following the election, he conjured up [...]
Archive for November, 2010
Kevin Rubs It In
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Taking on Google by Learning From Ants
Posted in Computers on November 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Fifteenth- and 16th-century European explorers helped to transform cartography during the Age of Discovery. Rather than mapping newly discovered worlds, Blaise Agüera y Arcas is out to invent new ways of viewing the old ones. Mr. Agüera y Arcas is the architect of Bing Maps, the online mapping service that is part of Microsoft Corp.’s [...]
Mother Madness
Posted in Living on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Spend every moment with your child? Make your own baby food and use cloth diapers? Erica Jong wonders how motherhood became such a prison for modern women. Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you know that we have endured an orgy of motherphilia for at least the last two decades. Movie stars proudly display [...]
Five Best Books on Movies
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Picture By Lillian Ross (1952) It never had been done before: a small, 30-ish journalist asked if she could watch a movie being made—”The Red Badge of Courage,” by John Huston, out of Stephen Crane, with Audie Murphy as the boy tested on the Civil War battlefield. Apparently no one noticed her. So Lillian Ross [...]
The Secrets Behind Edible Irony
Posted in Living on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Armed with an industrial-sized blow torch and a 10-liter canister of liquid nitrogen, Alex Stupak was ready to roast ice cream. As a meringue-like base whirred in a standing mixer, the tattoo-covered 30-year-old poured in the liquid nitrogen, raising gales of puffy white vapor that, within minutes, created a glistening, white, frozen mousse. Carefully scooping [...]
Bill O’Reilly’s threats
Posted in Other on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Bill O’Reilly wants my head. On Thursday night, the Fox News host asked, as part of a show that would be seen by 5.5 million people: “Does sharia law say we can behead Dana Milbank?” He then added, “That was a joke.” Hilarious! Decapitation jokes just slay me, and this one had all the more [...]
For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue
Posted in Animals on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Cutta Cutta, who inspired the study, belongs to a researcher at M.I.T. It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose. Cats lap water so fast [...]
The Rise of the Tao
Posted in Religion on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Abbess Yin Xinhui in the Hall of the Jade Emperor on Mount Mao, built at a cost of $1.5 million. YIN XINHUI reached the peak of Mount Yi and surveyed the chaos. The 47-year-old Taoist abbess was on a sacred mission: to consecrate a newly rebuilt temple to one of her religion’s most important deities, [...]
With hope, farewell fear
Posted in Health on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Cancer The long struggle to understand cancer The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. Scribner; 541 pages. Here’s how they look in the lymph IT IS said that when the good burghers of Amsterdam were first presented with a rhinoceros—armoured, horned, three-toed, with a prehensile lip—spectators shook their heads in [...]
The New Dealers’ Court
Posted in Law on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
We have entered a new season of intense constitutional debate. Today’s Supreme Court will, in the next few years, face serious challenges to the unprecedented constitutional reach of Barack Obama’s health-care program—and likely to other ambitious federal ventures. As if to prepare the ground for a new confrontation, President Obama used his State of the [...]
Fairy Tale Comes True for Germany’s ‘Dragon Castle’
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A Rhineland Legend Reborn Schloss Drachenburg castle overlooking the Rhine River at Königswinter, opposite the former West German capital, Bonn. It was built in just three years between 1881 and 1884 by a wealthy stockbroker, Stephan Sarter. Dubbed the “Neuschwanstein of the Rhine,” it is regarded as a prime example of historicism, a 19th century [...]
Going postal
Posted in Law on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A history of parcel bombs Sending explosives through the post has a long and murky history Rogue mail in the Raj PRINTER cartridges and air freight may be new, but lethal missives are not. The Bandbox Plot of November 4th 1712, foiled by Jonathan Swift (author of “Gulliver’s Travels”), was an attempt to kill Robert [...]
An Epistolary Performer
Posted in Literature on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s humorous and impassioned dialogue with friends, enemies—and himself “It’s been ten years since Katie excommunicated me. She used to keep a lightweight typewriter for me in London when she worked for Oxford Press in Dover Street, but I offended her after John Berryman’s death while she and I were having a [...]
Walking to the Heart of Greece
Posted in Other on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
As a boy in 1940s Greece, my friend Costas, now a retired banker, had a pistol shoved in his face by a communist guerrilla screaming that he wanted to requisition the family mule. Knowing that the animal meant his family’s survival in desperate times, Costas refused. He might have been shot then and there if [...]
Looking Back
Posted in Politics on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
The virtues and hazards of going ‘all in’ at moments of crisis. Discussing the Iraq surge strategy in 2006, former President George W. Bush notes that during his presidency he read 14 biographies of Abraham Lincoln. The cause of his preoccupation with Lincoln is obvious: The Bush presidency will be remembered as a war presidency. [...]
Twinkle, Twinkle, Giant Star
Posted in Living on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Daylight-saving time ends this weekend. The clocks change. Is that the best the modern world can do for a sun-worshiping ritual? About 10 years ago, Richard Cohen was running a British publishing house and trying to find someone to write a book he wanted to read, one about the sun. He found no takers and [...]
The Two Cultures
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 16, 2010 | Comments Off
Many of the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know are liberal, so it seems strange that American liberalism should adopt an economic philosophy that excludes psychology, emotion and morality. Yet that is what has happened. The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy [...]
Behind closed doors
Posted in History on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Early Renaissance Italy Odd goings-on in Godless nunneries Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, & Arson in the Convents of Italy. By Craig Monson. University of Chicago Press; 264 pages CRAIG MONSON says his book, five tales about unruly nuns, might while away a plane flight. He is too modest. “Nuns Behaving Badly” [...]
Socially challenging
Posted in Living on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Psychopathy Psychopathy seems to be caused by specific mental deficiencies Fancy a game of cards before dinner? WHAT makes people psychopaths is not an idle question. Prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms. The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main [...]
This Is Your Brain on Metaphors
Posted in Living on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ [...]
Web
Posted in On Language, tagged November 14 2010 on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory outside Geneva, was sketching out a global system for sharing information over the Internet. A March 1989 document that he drafted with the drab title “Information Management: A Proposal” had met with [...]
I hate to tell you
Posted in The Word, tagged November 14 2010 on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Phrases that announces ‘I’m lying‘ I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there’s a whole range of phrases that aren’t doing the jobs you think they’re doing. In fact, “I hate to be the one to tell you this” (like its cousin, “I hate to say it”) is one of them. [...]
Why President Obama is right about India
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Much grousing about the expense of President Obama’s India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him. Especially when his first stop is Mumbai, scene of one of the most savage and sustained terror attacks in modern times. It is protested [...]
Obama’s Gifts to the GOP
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Republicans own the political center for now. Not because they deserve it. Democrats are down, and sniping at each other. That’s the way it goes when parties lose. What’s interesting is the mood this week among Republicans on the ground. It’s not triumphal. They all seem to have in the back of their minds a [...]
Swan Lake
Posted in Photo galleries on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Hamburg’s “Alster swans,” named after the city’s most famous lake, where they live, are known across the country. Each year, they are removed from the lake before the winter cold arrives and taken to another, warmer body of water where they reside as the Alster freezes over. On Monday, “Swan father” Olaf Niess and his [...]
Not as Easy as A,B,C
Posted in Law on November 15, 2010 | Comments Off
Fighting crime in one of Manhattan’s rougher neighborhoods. The New York City of today is so far from the 1980s version of the city depicted in “Alphaville,” a real-life account of crime fighting in what was then one of Manhattan’s rougher neighborhoods, that many readers may find the stories of criminality and chaos improbable. Hollywood’s [...]
Ain’t That a Shame?
Posted in Living on November 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Last year, seniors at Dartmouth and Cornell found themselves getting strong-armed to contribute to their parting “class gifts.” The student fund raisers were given lists of those who had donated—and of those who had yet to. As the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported, the eager young rainmakers then set about using the obligatory social-networking [...]
Newly Published Memoir Recalls Horror of Western Front
Posted in History on November 11, 2010 | Comments Off
The WWI Diary of Ernst Jünger A photo of Ernst Jünger, a lieutenant in the German infantry, taken shortly before the Battle of the Somme in northeastern France in 1916. It shows him wearing his Iron Cross. Jünger’s war diary has just been published for the first time, shortly ahead of the 92nd anniversary of [...]
I’m Very, Very, Very Sorry … Really?
Posted in Living on November 11, 2010 | Comments Off
We Apologize More to Strangers Than Family, and Why Women Ask for Forgiveness More Than Men I’d like to tell the man whose cab I stole in the rain last week that I’m very sorry. But to my mom, whose driving I criticized recently? Not so much. I’m in good company on this. According to [...]
The Zealotry Of Free Thinkers
Posted in Literature on November 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Many philosophes ended up gouty and spherical, despite the austerities The history of ideas is a field that is extraordinarily difficult to popularize. Philipp Blom’s approach is to use collective biography, in the case of “A Wicked Company” the 18th-century thinkers of the Enlightenment’s “forgotten radicalism,” as he puts. They include Diderot, Hume and Rousseau, [...]
