May 6, 2008
How Low Can You Go?
This post was originally published at OpenSalon, a beta-test group blogging project of Salon Media.
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April 28, 2008
That Didn’t Take Long
ABC News reports Miley Cyrus, Disney’s most recent pre-pubescent cash cow, is officially “embarrassed” by photographs set to appear in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, in which the 15 year-old star of Disney’s hit TV show “Hannah Montana” appears clutching a satin sheet to her naked breast.
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April 14, 2008
Reinventing Myself
Spring is time to refresh and renew, time for cleaning and clearing and starting over. This season, I’m taking the concept beyond the closet and the garage, beyond even the many rooms of my own internal mansion, and have embarked on a path I first imagined taking as a lad in school, when I became aware that behind each great and sometimes impenetrable work of literature I had to digest was the story of a real person.
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April 7, 2008
Passions Over Torch Run Hot
The fourth and fifth stops on a planned 85,000 mile relay bearing the Olympic flame from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece to the site of this year’s Summer Games in Bejing, China turned ugly over the weekend, as thousands of protesters in London and Paris disrupted the procession, drawing attention to China’s reputation for human rights abuses and its heavy-handed suppression of internal dissent in Tibet.
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April 3, 2008
Seen That Movie, Too
A CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s.
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March 18, 2008
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States, had $17 billion in cash and salable assets on March 11. At the close of trading on Friday, March 14, the eighty-five year-old firm had an exchange-listed market capitalization of just $4 billion. Over the ensuing weekend, one of its competitors, JP Morgan Chase & Co., agreed to buy Bear Stearns in a paper transaction backed by financing from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, for just under $240 million.
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March 11, 2008
The Sound of Breaking Glass
America loves nothing more than a sex scandal.
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February 19, 2008
Pass the Fork, Please.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court declined an opportunity for a peek at the man behind the curtain, refusing to certify for appeal a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of numerous Muslim lawyers, journalists and other American citizens, who argued the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program rendered them unable to perform their jobs.
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February 14, 2008
Who Loves Ya, Baby?
The true origins of celebrating the notion of romantic love on February 14 are not well documented, though the exchange of elaborate, handmade gifts between paramours was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and began to really take off in the United States once Esther Howland (herself now considered something of a saint by the American Greeting Card Association) began selling mass-produced Valentine’s cards in the 1840s.
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February 12, 2008
The Winter of Our Discontent
…what is genuine, familiar, and identifiable is the way Americans beat the game: the land-taking before the airport is built, the quick bucks, the plagiarism, the abuse of trust, the near theft, which, if it succeeds, can be glossed over — these are the guilts with which Ethan will have to live in his coming prosperity…
— Edward Weeks, in a review of the John Steinbeck novel
The Winter of Our Discontent, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1961
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