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- Slate V: Could Today's Tennis Pros Win With Wood?
As the U.S. Open Tennis Championship gets underway, Slate V asks two world-class players what would happen if today's pros had to play with old-fashioned wooden rackets. - What will the president say to get Democrats excited for the coming campaign?
Labor Day traditionally begins the final sprint to Election Day. So starting today, we're going to offer a new end-of-the-week feature. Each week, I'll post some of the questions I'm trying to answer based on news of the week or something that's come up in my reporting. In the following weeks, I'll try to answer some of these questions. Feel free to weigh in with answers?or with more political questions?at slatepolitics@gmail.com or in the comments section below. Here are this week's questions:[more ...]
Labor Day - Gmail - Holidays - Politics - United States
- Are the next-generation Neato and Mint robo-cleaners better than the Roomba?
If you ask a robot scientist why his industry is so interested in cleaning our floors, chances are he'll mention the "three D's." Robots, it turns out, are best suited to replacing humans in jobs that are dirty, dull, or dangerous. Sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping fit the first two D's, and depending on your dog's diet, perhaps the last one as well. It's no wonder, then, that the world had such high hopes for the Roomba, the autonomous floor-cleaning robot that first went on sale in 2002. The Roomba was built by iRobot, a company best known for its bomb-disposal machines?in other words, excellent preparation for designing a tool to help frat brothers clean up after keggers. The Roomba quickly became an icon?nerds hacked it, cats loved it, and lonely people grew to consider the bot something like a pet. There was just one problem: When it came to cleaning, the Roomba sucked, and not always in a good way.[more ...]
- The U.S. auto industry is smaller but healthier.
Did you see the dreadful news about automobile sales in August? "U.S. Car Sales Plunged in August," the Wall Street Journal headline declared. "Auto Sales Post Weakest August Since 1983," noted Reuters.[more ...]
- How many uses are there for a dead body?
Car manufacturers sometimes use cadavers in crash tests, according to Wired magazine. Researchers claim that, despite advances in dummy technology, there's still nothing like good old flesh and bone to validate new safety features. Everyone knows that medical students rely on cadavers, too?but are there other unexpected uses for donated remains?[more ...]
- Economists are making the case politicians are afraid to: Immigration is great for the U.S.
If you pay attention only to politics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the current debate about immigration in America is limited to how severely it should be restricted?whether we need only to seal the border or actually change the birthright citizenship clause in the Constitution.[more ...]
- Drew Barrymore and Justin Long as slackers in long-distance love in Going the Distance.
Going the Distance (Paramount) is a pleasant, floppy romantic comedy that's hard to hate?the lead couple, played by Justin Long and Drew Barrymore, are too game and appealing to inspire much snark?but also hard to love. There's just not quite enough to the movie: not enough jokes, not enough obstacles, not enough sex. (Though there's plenty of talk about sex. Perhaps in an attempt to break down the wall between Apatow man-comedy and gooey chick flicks, the script by Geoff LaTulippe keeps up a steady flow of profanity.) Still, I'll give Going the Distance a pleasant, floppy stamp of approval. At least, unlike many recent romantic comedies (do I really have to name them? The Ugly Truth, All About Steve, The Proposal, et boring cetera), this film doesn't center around two mean, shallow jerks who communicate only in some sort of rigidly gendered mating code.[more ...]
- The Slatest: Evening Edition Ladies' night is not unconstitutional; Jan Brewer is not going to talk about the beheadings that are not happening in the Arizona desert; farmers are not surprised to get calls from the day traders following them on Twitter.[more ...]
- The New York Times' "Thursday Styles" section discovers flat-chested pride.
The New York Times' "Thursday Styles" section discovers A-cup vanity.[more ...]
- Is the New York Times' book section really a boys' club?
Two weeks ago, best-selling author Jodi Picoult sent a Tweet in a fit of pique. Upon reading Michiko Kakutani's glowing review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom in the New York Times, the lady novelist took to her keyboard and typed out the following:[more ...]
- Prosecutors can ask for a five-year sentence for Illinois' ex-governor.
After the public spectacle surrounding the arrest and trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the jury's decision to hang on 23 of 24 charges has largely been viewed as an embarrassing failure for Patrick Fitzgerald, Chicago's top federal prosecutor. The editorial boards of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among others, have suggested that a retrial crosses the line from prosecution to persecution and would be a huge waste of public resources. Still, government lawyers declared that there would be a rematch, and the judge overseeing the case scheduled it for the beginning of next year.[more ...]
- An exclusive look at the artwork of Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
An exclusive look at the artwork of Guantanamo Bay prisoners.[more ...]
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- Palinisms: Did she really say that?
"Wow,media goofballs rearing heads this wk,big time!Wonder what's up?Taking the cake:ink re:Bristol=a diva? Silly;obviously have nvr met her"?Tweet, Sept. 1, 2010.[more ...]
- The broadening backlash against American Islam.
Two months ago, Rick Lazio, the leading Republican candidate for governor of New York, challenged his Democratic opponent, Andrew Cuomo, to investigate a proposed Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero. When Cuomo replied that the issue was religious freedom, Lazio insisted that his concerns were strictly about who would fund the project and what its imam had said about 9/11. "It's outrageous, honestly, that Andrew Cuomo is raising [the] issue of religion here," Lazio told a TV interviewer. "This is about security."[more ...]
- A review of Kristin Hersh's memoir, Rat Girl.
When Kristin Hersh was 18 years old, her indie rock band Throwing Muses recorded its first album, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and she became a mother for the first time. In Hersh's new memoir, Rat Girl, based on her diary, she chronicles an extraordinary year. I'm willing to bet that there are very few budding teen rock stars who have to figure out how to avoid the smoke in clubs, how to position their guitars over swollen bellies, and what maternity clothes are best for headlining concerts. (Hersh says '50s style dresses, if you were wondering.) Her original journal entries appear to have been fleshed out with dialogue in the published version, plus there are vignettes from her early childhood and snippets from her songs inspired by real-life events.[more ...]
- I changed my mind and now want to have a child, but my husband won't hear of it.
Get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)[more ...]
- Play Lean/Lock and test your skills as a political pundit.
Test your powers of political forecasting.[more ...]
- Welcome to Slate Labs: Experiments with multimedia journalism.
Experiments with multimedia journalism.[more ...]
- The editorial lessons taught by the now-dead gunman who took hostages at the Discovery Channel today.
Rarely in my long, sweet life as a press critic have I knocked a newspaper or a news channel or a magazine for "over-covering" a subject. Oh, I may have sighed and changed the channel when I had heard just about enough about the unsolved disappearance of Natalee Holloway or the swift-boat business or the birther stuff. But my instincts have long been to judge the quality of the work of my peers and worry less about its conciseness.[more ...]
- George Clooney plays a professional assassin in The American. Are there full-time assassins in real life?
In the new movie The American, George Clooney plays a mysterious professional assassin. The American got the Explainer wondering?are there people in the real world who commit murders for a living?[more ...]
- How the original Preppy Handbook changed my life.
You can't blame Lisa Birnbach for revisiting her greatest hit, The Official Preppy Handbook, which climbed the best-seller lists in 1980. But True Prep, a sequel that arrives in bookstores next week, doesn't compare. It simply isn't helpful enough.[more ...]
- Joan Rivers shoots down the stars on Fashion Police.
Fashion Police (E!) trailed in the wake of Emmy coverage as if bringing up the rear in a parade of tall ships and, also, as if diving for the ultimate morsels shaken from a chum bucket. The title is a misnomer. There was no police presence. In capturing their photo evidence, the lens men of the celebrity press had already rounded up the suspects, and the eyes arrested the unusual. The function of this red-carpet wrap-up was judicial, and it would more accurately be called Fashion Hanging Judges. Its panel convened to deliberate tired silhouettes, brassiere miscalculations, and similar human atrocities. Joan Rivers was chief justice and senior executioner.[more ...]
- George Clooney spends a long time making a gun in The American.
The American (Focus Features), the second film by the Dutch photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control), is like a James Bond fantasy for very patient Europhiles. The story, loosely based on a novel by Martin Booth, contains gunplay, exotic locations, and a bevy of international beauties throwing themselves at a hunky hit man. But all of these elements are suspended in a medium of near-motionless anomie that recalls the austere thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville or, at times, the existential longueurs of Antonioni. If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type?spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes?The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.[more ...]
- Stunning photos of the Pakistani floods.
Stunning photos of the Pakistani floods.[more ...]
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- Why is everyone always writing off Netflix?
People who think and write about technology companies for a living are prone to be wrong now and again. Try to find, for example, veteran analysts or journalists who haven't at some point made a claim about Apple that they didn't later regret. The technology sector is too dynamic, and the growth of certain technologies too explosive and unpredictable, for anyone to be right all the time. That's part of the fun.[more ...]
- The sports media celebrate Kevin Durant for being someone he isn't.
On the morning of July 7, Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City's supremely gifted pterosaur, who is currently dunking on people's heads all along the Bosphorus at the FIBA World Championships, announced he would be re-signing with the Thunder. This was a fairly unremarkable piece of business?Durant, a year from restricted free agency, was expected to re-up?and the news arrived via his Twitter account: "Exstension for 5 more years wit the #thunder....God Is Great, me and my family came a long way...I love yall man forreal, this a blessing!"[more ...]
- What Tiger didn't understand about his mistresses.
Scandals about race hold a certain queasy fascination for Americans, but why wouldn't they, given our history? And if the incident in question offers the opportunity to hurl accusations of racism at someone prominent (especially when the someone is a self-styled moral taskmaster known for her on-air sadism), this is a happy day indeed. Every scandal is a register of social anxiety, and let's face it, race is right up there with sex and money, scandal's perennial motifs, on the social neurosis meter.[more ...]
- Slate's Culture Gabfest on the Emmys, True Prep, and the songs of summer 2010.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 102 with Jody Rosen, Dana Stevens, and June Thomas by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:[more ...]
- My husband is finally home from his deployment to Iraq.
After a year's deployment, I can't believe the ordeal is over.[more ...]
- What's with all the celebrities sentenced to community service? Do they really help anyone?
Dear My Goodness,An acquaintance of mine was arrested recently and sentenced to community service. I've noticed an endless parade of celebrities lately getting the same punishment for some minor violation or another. I can't help but wonder, is court-ordered community service actually helpful? And what kinds of service does the court usually offer?[more ...]
- Obama's frustrating, unfocused speech on Iraq.
President Barack Obama's speech from the Oval Office Tuesday night was a strange muddle?a televised prime-time address that lacked a bottom line, a consistent theme, a clear road to the future.[more ...]
- Neither libertarians nor the Kochs should try to hide their relationship.
Congratulations, libertarians! August 2010 was the month when you joined an exclusive club: people accused of shilling for amoral and scary billionaires.[more ...]
- How does booze extend your lifespan?
People who drink heavily live longer than those who completely abstain from alcohol, according to a new study conducted by a psychologist at the University of Texas. How, exactly, does booze extend your lifespan?[more ...]
- The Los Angeles Times takes on the two L.A. sacred cows—teachers and unions—and lives to print again!
Nobody but a schoolteacher or a union acolyte could criticize the Los Angeles Times' terrific package of stories?complete with searchable database?about teacher performance in the Los Angeles Unified School District.[more ...]
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- Troy Polamalu's hair is insured for $1 million. How does body-part insurance work?
A shampoo manufacturer has insured the flowing hair of Pittsburgh Steelers football player Troy Polamalu for $1 million, according to the Associated Press. When a rumor that pop star Mariah Carey had insured her legs for $1 billion spread in 2006, Daniel Engber explained how body-part insurance works?and whether it's all just a publicity stunt. The article is reprinted below.[more ...]
- Mad Men Week 6: Is Peggy one great campaign away from being treated like Don?
I love the character of Ted Chaough. The actor who plays him just looks like a smug operator. And he's certainly obsessed enough with Don to dig into his past. Remember, he already keeps "the boy who used to work for Don" on the payroll in order to divine his enemy's thinking. But it wasn't as if Don seemed freaked out by the general. Perhaps this is some period fad that we've forgotten? Could you rent a general for an event in the same manner that you could rent a beatnik? The more you think about, it was a weird move on Chaough's part.[more ...]
- Why killing "criminals" with drones is a war crime.
Are the masters of "drone porn" committing war crimes by remote control? It's a bit shocking that more people aren't asking this question. I have a feeling that many of us, particularly liberal Obama supporters (like myself, for instance), haven't wanted to look too closely at what is being done in his name, in our name, when these remote-controlled and often tragically inaccurate weapons of small-group slaughter incinerate innocents from the sky, in what are essentially video-game massacres in which real people die.[more ...]
- Corporate bosses are whining, even though they're reporting record profits.
It's hard out there for a CEO. There's a Democrat in the White House, and Washington is being ruled by a coalition of socialists and anti-capitalist thugs. There's uncertainty about taxes and policy. Business leaders are constantly being vilified for taking home huge paychecks without providing meaningful returns to shareholders, or creating jobs, or boosting wages. The newly passed financial reform bill requires CEOs of public companies to measure and report the ratio of their pay to that of their workers. Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwartzman is complaining that the Obama administration is like Hitler invading Poland.[more ...]
- The Tea Party would love The Hunger Games.
I also mourned Finnick. His male prostitute past fit the books' internal logic while providing one of the series' more adult moments, which made me worry a little about what younger readers would make of it. I think you're right, Nina, that it's for their benefit that we don't get more details about the Capitol secrets he gleaned.[more ...]
- Palinisms: Did she really say that?
"Silly media reports 'maybe thousands' @Beck's 'irrelevant' event; insinuating MSM sheeple mustn't believe their own eyes&ears re: event's truth"[more ...]
- The bliss of an 18-month, paid, Swedish paternity leave.
For nearly 18 months, I woke up at 4 a.m. with my all-too-alert toddler son. Three hours later, when my Swedish wife left for the day, I would set out a second breakfast and then dress the boy and his 4-year-old sister and walk them to her state-subsidized preschool. Then my boy and I would go build sand castles in one of five nearby neighborhood parks. I packed snack bags, changed diapers, and pretended to be a grumpy old troll. I sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" more times than I want to think about.[more ...]
- The prescient cultural criticism of Max Headroom.
There's a scene in Back to the Future Part II in which Marty McFly, having traveled to the year 2015, walks into a retro diner. Marty is greeted by a digital maitre d' with white hair, a gentle voice, and smooth, almost plastic skin. "Welcome to the Cafe '80s," he says, "where it's always morning in America, even in the afternoo-noo-noon," the final word skipping out of his mouth as though recorded on a scratched CD.[more ...]
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- How do you measure a crowd as big as the one at the Glenn Beck rally?
According to CBS News, Glenn Beck's rally in Washington, D.C. on Saturday attracted about 87,000 people. Beck himself put the number at more than 500,000. Other sources, like NBC News, had it somewhere in between. In an "Explainer" column from last year and reprinted below, Juliet Lapidos described how experts come up with these estimates.[more ...]
- Feisal Abdul Rauf defends his plan for an Islamic center near Ground Zero.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero, is traveling through the Middle East at the request of the State Department. As part of this ambassadorial tour, he has given an interview to The National of Abu Dhabi, published yesterday, in which he responds to questions about the U.S. uproar over his project. Are his answers adequate? Let's take a look.[more ...]
- "Through a Glass Darkly"
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Traci Brimhall read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..[more ...]
- Cut down on e-mail chaos with Gmail's new Priority Inbox.
I get about 200 spam e-mails a day. The senders go to extraordinary lengths to get my attention?they torture the English language, they offer me great discounts on life insurance and exotic pharmaceuticals, they promise to make my wife a very happy woman?but it's all for naught. Over the last few years Gmail, like other e-mail services, has become very good at spotting spam. It catches just about every junk message before it hits my inbox; the messages are rerouted to my spam folder, which I almost never open (and when I do open it, I almost never notice legitimate messages marked as spam). In other words, spam?which was once the great boogeyman of the Internet, a scourge that was often predicted to bring down e-mail entirely?is no longer a problem for me. When I polled my colleagues at Slate recently, many reported a similar situation. They don't spend much time dealing with junk mail. I bet you don't either.[more ...]
- The conservative rebellion against the establishment is doing wonders for the GOP. Seriously.
The life of an Establishment Republican used to be simple. If you dodged scandal and could produce polls showing you could get re-elected, the party back in Washington would go to bat for you. You'd win. Your biggest threat came from a group called the Club for Growth, a well-funded political machine that bundles money and bombs the airwaves on behalf of candidates who challenge wrong-voting "Republicans in Name Only"?RINOs. Stay out of the Club for Growth's way, and you're safe.[more ...]
- On the trail of the question, Who first said (or wrote) that journalism is the "first rough draft of history"?
Many journalists give former Washington Post President and Publisher Philip L. Graham credit for being the first to describe journalism as "the first rough draft of history."[more ...]
- How Obama's struggles with disaster and war may be casting Bush's presidency in a more favorable light.
In November, George W. Bush will publish a memoir, Decision Points, in which he will try to put the tough moments of his presidency into perspective. His successor is already helping. On Sunday, President Obama spoke in New Orleans to commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. On Tuesday, he will speak to the nation about the final stage of the Iraq war. The back-to-back events could be called the Cleaning Up Bush's Messes Tour?what many Democrats would call the entire Obama presidency so far?and yet both events highlight Obama's struggles with disaster and war, potentially putting his predecessor in a more favorable light.[more ...]
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows how feminism is done. Again.
Anyone who didn't already believe Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be fashioned of pure steel was reminded of the fact Friday night as she delivered a speech to a group of lawyers and judges that was meant to have been delivered by her husband. Martin Ginsburg had been invited to deliver his remarks at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., but he died in late June of metastatic cancer. As Ginsburg explained Friday evening, "He had his speech all written out." And so she read it?with a handful of interpolations?in its entirety to several hundred rapt listeners.[more ...]
- How can the trapped Chilean miners keep from getting depressed?
Thirty-three men trapped in a collapsed Chilean gold and copper mine will have to sit tight for four months as rescuers drill an escape route. The miners are living in an underground chamber about 540 square feet in size?slightly smaller than the average studio apartment in New York City. Chilean authorities have called in NASA to help deal with the physical and mental health effects of prolonged confinement. How do psychologists keep people in tight quarters from getting depressed?[more ...]
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- Slate's Hang Up and Listen on Stephen Strasburg, Albert Pujols and Glenn Beck, and the Madden video-game series.
Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:[more ...]
- Taking the new Preppy Handbook for a test drive.
This September sees the publication of Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd's True Prep, a sequel to Birnbach's The Preppy Handbook, which according to the New York Times has sold 1.3 million copies since 1981. I was not one of those 1.3 million?I bought my copy years later in a used bookstore?but I read that thing constantly for months, joined the cult, earned the T-shirt (pardon me, the polo shirt). And I've spent too many hours thinking about how I would update Birnbach's funny and too-true dissection of the world of Lacoste, squash, and boarding schools.[more ...]
- Dear Prudence chats live with readers at Washingtonpost.com.
Emily Yoffe Writes: Good afternoon, everyone. Let's get to it.[more ...]
- An Emmy for the first sitcom character with Asperger's: The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper.
The 2010 Emmy for lead actor in a comedy went to Jim Parsons, who plays Dr. Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, the popular CBS sitcom. (It was the only award for the series.) In 2009, Paul Collins took a close look at Sheldon's hilarious, geeky, gawky character and argued that although the series never describes him as such, Sheldon is the first sitcom star to have Asperger's syndrome. The article is reprinted below.[more ...]
- Glenn Beck's rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected—the Waterworld of white self-pity.
One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like New York and Texas and California, and there have even been projections of the time(s) at which it will occur and when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber the former white majority. But it also exerts a strong subliminal effect in states like Alaska that have an overwhelming white preponderance.[more ...]
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- How Huge and Fat Camp win our hearts.
Is ABC Family the best network on basic cable? No, no, it isn't. For consistency of vision and quality of programming, it lags behind frisky, risky, darkly handsome FX. But that is about the extent of its competition. This column has ventured before that there is notable substance to the channel's glossy melodramas, and the column was totally sober at the time. Pretty Little Liars, Make It or Break It, Greek: These are not your father's teen soaps. More to the point, these are not yours. Their soapiness is not just frothy but purifying?morally sensible though not preachy or, like, uplifting. The characters are drawn roundly enough to streamroll the characters of our beloved Saved by the Bell, never mind the camping little brats of the CW.[more ...]
- True Blood Episode 11: How many great characters have to die before the season is over?
How many great characters have to die before the season is over?[more ...]
- "Modern Love" revenge.
I have always related to the world by messing with media, in one way or another. As a teenager in the 1980s I made sound collages and mixtapes, and today I write books, produce documentaries, and teach college classes on popular culture. Wikipedia summarizes me as a "performance artist or 'media prankster' who filed an application in 1997 to register the phrase 'Freedom of Expression' as a trademark in the United States." Media saturate most everything I do, and they are also hardwired into the life I share with my wife, Lynne.[more ...]
- Don't ridicule Glenn Beck's tribute to MLK. Celebrate it.
Saturday, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington, Glenn Beck held a conservative rally on the National Mall. Civil rights activists called it a fraud. "He's mimicking Dr. King, in some sense humiliating the tradition," scoffed Jesse Jackson. Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, declared, "We will not stand silent as some seek to hijack, as some seek to distort and contort, as some seek to bamboozle and confuse the vision of Dr. King's dream."[more ...]
- What seven years of war in Iraq has done to American society.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama will make a speech about Iraq. With 50,000 troops still in the country "in an advisory capacity," he can't declare victory, so he will instead celebrate "the end of combat operations." If he follows others who have already marked this occasion, he will focus his comments on Iraq: the state of Iraqi democracy, the level of violence, the impact of seven years of war on Iraqi society.[more ...]
- Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is an epic map of our imprisonment.
A person who read only the first chapter of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom might be tempted to dismiss it as a pretty callow piece of writing. That chapter freeze-dries the novel's protagonists, the Berglunds, at a moment in history, the 1980s, when they and their kind were still relatively unselfconscious and thus shrink-wrappable. "Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill?the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier." They drive a Volvo 240, listen to public radio, cook from The Silver Palate cookbook, worry about lead in their Fiestaware, use cloth diapers, fret about maximizing their children's brilliance.[more ...]
- The evolution of the Minnesota State Fair.
The milk at the Minnesota State Fair is ice cold with a thick mustache-forming layer of foam on top, and you can drink as much of it as you'd like for a dollar. It quenches thirst like water, especially after you've eaten a dozen warm, soft-centered cookies. My third and final glass is served to me by a beauty queen?one of the 12 finalists in the Princess Kay of the Milky Way pageant. When they are not busy having their heads sculpted in 90-pound blocks of butter, these beauty queens are everywhere, reminding fair-goers of the wholesomeness of dairy with an evangelical fervor.[more ...]
- Glenn Beck's rally was about as angry as a Teletubbies episode.
On Friday night, FreedomWorks was capitalizing on Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday with a rally of its own. Activists crowded inside the ideally named Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, where Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., ripped the roof off of the place with a speech that started with district-by-district politics and built to a call-and-response: "Are you in? I'm in! Be in!" Mike Lee, a Republican lawyer who is all but certain to be the next senator from Utah, told the crowd about his favorite constitutional power (letters of marque and reprisal) and described the Constitution as a sort of Tony Robbins manual: a "recipe for economic prosperity," a way to make "amazing things" happen. As the politicians talked, volunteers walked up and down the aisles handing out signs for the candidates?"champions of freedom"?endorsed by FreedomWorks PAC.[more ...]
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- How those foreign visitors in Times Square are helping to balance the trade deficit.
After traversing a mountain path 6,000 feet up the Swiss Alps, under the face of the forbidding Eiger, where cows with clunky bells far outnumbered the people, I stumbled into a barebones restaurant?and was shocked to see a college classmate whom I hadn't seen in at least 15 years. The surprise wasn't so much that I saw someone I knew?we all have tales of random encounters in out-of-the-way places. Rather, it was that I ran into an American at all.[more ...]
- The great 3-D debate: Eye muscles are overrated.
Eye muscles are overrated.[more ...]
- The art and science of carrying things on your head.
As floodwaters continue to ravage Pakistan, photographers have documented the devastation in harrowing detail. As in most coverage of Third World disasters and the developing world, a number of images show people carrying heavy stuff on their heads with relative ease. Would we all be better off carrying bulky packages on our heads?[more ...]
- Will the presence of three women really change the court in any real way?
Much has been made of the fact that Elena Kagan's confirmation last month means that for the first time in American history, there will be three women on the high court. But beyond a sense that the court will be slightly more representative of the American people, and the possibility of yet more intriguing white lacy scarves from on high, what does the difference between having one, two, or three women at the court really signify?[more ...]
- Don't worry about a bubble in U.S. government bonds.
Everyone is fretting about the possibility of a bubble in U.S. government bonds. Bloomberg BusinessWeek worried here. Personal finance columnist Andrew Leckey warned against one here. Evan Newmark in the Wall Street Journal does too.[more ...]
- Tech startups are changing the way workers are screened and hired.
When Michael Glukhovsky and Slava Akhmechet, the founders of RethinkDB, a database technology startup that changes how people store and access data, received $1.2 million in funding earlier this year, they began looking for their first employee. They turned to job boards. They recruited from their site. They tried to poach talent. They even wrote a blog post on their hiring woes and entered the how-to fray.[more ...]
- The Political Gabfest for Aug. 27, 2010.
Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.[more ...]
- Web users in the United Arab Emirates have more to worry about than having just their BlackBerries cracked.
The United Arab Emirates continues to wrestle with Research in Motion over government access to BlackBerry messages, threatening to ban the company's services if it doesn't severely weaken the anti-snooping protections on its smartphones. But years before the RIM battle boiled over, other Western companies handed the country a far greater power: the capability to infiltrate the secure system used by most banking, mail, and financing sites, making the most protected data on the Web available to the prying eyes of the emirates' government-connected telecommunications giant.[more ...]
- How South Africa became the world's No. 1 asylum destination.
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa?Givemore Gift Nhidza is not dead.[more ...]
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- Judicial activism is OK for embryos, but not for gays.
Remember when conservatives were against judicial activism? It seems like just a few weeks ago. In fact, it was a few weeks ago. A federal judge had just struck down California's law against gay marriage. National Review, among others, called it a "raw exercise of judicial imperiousness" by a judge who "smuggled in his own moral sentiments."[more ...]
- A review of Joyce Maynard's The Good Daughters.
Years after writing the 1972 New York Times Magazine essay that would make her famous as a voice of her generation (and ignite a brief love affair with J.D. Salinger), Joyce Maynard dissected that essay in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World.[more ...]
- Corrections from the last week.
In an Aug. 26 "DoubleX," Noreen Malone incorrectly referred to Alex Sink's gubernatorial bid as failed. Sink won the Democratic primary.[more ...]
- The Proto-Internet of 1704: The small ways in which Colonial newspapers anticipated the Web.
Before Wikipedia, before blogs, before comment areas or message boards, before the Internet?hell, before the mass adoption of indoor plumbing?readers were generating valuable content.[more ...]
- Google's new Gmail phone service makes calling anywhere from home cheap and crystal clear.
Among the many prophecies that techies take for granted, none seem more certain than the death of the home phone. Just look at that sorry thing, if you even still have one: Your landline remains fixed in a single spot; it can't text, take pictures, access the Web, or play games; and it's plagued by telemarketers and robocalls. Since most people find it impossible to navigate modern life without a cell phone?and because it's expensive and somewhat redundant to have both a landline and a cell plan?it's no surprise that people are ditching their home phones in droves. In 2003, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, fewer than 5 percent of American adults got by with only a cell phone. By 2009, that number was nearly 23 percent?and the agency found that the rate at which people are abandoning landlines is increasing.[more ...]
- The new miniseries by The Kids in the Hall finds their absurd sensibility intact.
Of the half-hour sketch comedy shows to brighten dorm rooms in the 1990s, The State was perhaps the slickest, Mr. Show maybe the giddiest, and The Kids in the Hall the most purely goofy. The five young men of the troupe were gentle in their ways, doing satire that resisted smirking. If they presented the least funny of these three shows, they compensated with hustle and charm. Maybe the key to their shared personality was how, in their heavy and unashamed indebtedness to Monty Python, they were pure aesthetes of absurdity. Maybe it was how they sought not to elicit explosions of hard laughter but rather a steady stream of small giggles. Or maybe it was just that they're Canadian.[more ...]
- Frank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.
In 2000, Frank Kermode, the great literary critic and scholar who died last week at the age of 90, gave a lecture called "The Cambridge Connection" about the history of the Cambridge University English department. It sounds like a parochial enough topic until you realize that the major figures in that department were I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis?probably the most important English critics of the 20th century. Kermode was too modest to include himself in the list. This was a man, after all, who titled his memoir Not Entitled?but he was of the same stature and belonged to the same tradition.[more ...]
- How can female Democratic pols advertise themselves in the age of Palin?
Even before Palin's five-for-five sweep Tuesday, there were signs that Democrats were worried that the Mama Grizzly narrative might be the only one resonating with voters: Last week, the pro-choice activist group Emily's List released a cringeworthy video featuring women? wearing "bear suits"? explaining humorlessly that the "real" Mama Grizzlies are the liberal mothers who want to protect their children's present and future. The video fell a galaxy or two short of subversively clever. But it made clear that these days, everything is reflected through a Palin-prism. So how should Democratic female pols market themselves in the Mama Grizzly era?[more ...]
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- Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on Sarah Palin's endorsement power, palliative care, and Jennifer Aniston's rom-com woes.
To listen to the DoubleX Gabfest, click the arrow on the player below. You can also download the audio file here or subscribe to the DoubleX podcasts feed via iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.[more ...]
- How bathroom posture affects your health.
Shortly before Christmas in 1978, the leader of the free world came down with a severe case of hemorrhoids. The pain was so bad that President Carter had to take a day off from work. A few weeks later, Time Magazine asked a proctologist named Michael Freilich to explain the president's ailment. "We were not meant to sit on toilets," he said, "we were meant to squat in the field." He's probably right.[more ...]
- Is a mosque near Ground Zero "insensitive"?
Ken Mehlman is gay. Lots of people thought so, but nobody knew for sure until Mehlman began telling friends and family in recent months. Now it's public: Mehlman has given a full interview to the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder.[more ...]
- The life story of the mosquito.
We welcome a thunderstorm after sweltering days. The air clears, the temperature goes down. And, damn, the mosquitoes hatch.[more ...]
- How do I handle the aftermath of domestic violence?
Get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)[more ...]
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