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- Slate V: Green Zone, Remember Me, and She's Out of My League
In this week's Summary Judgment, Mark Jordan Legan sums up what critics are saying about the big weekend movies: Green Zone, Remember Me, and She's Out of My League. - The Slatest: Weekend Edition Health care enters pivotal week; Google is "99.9 percent" sure it'll shut down its Chinese search engine; Michael Lewis says bonuses at bailed out banks are "elegant form of theft."[more ...]
- Bidenisms: A collection of the vice president's gaffes and head-slappers.
The vice president produced one new Bidenism this week during a state visit to Israel. Please continue to send your nominations (with a link, please) to slatebidenisms@gmail.com. For more, and our stab at a definition, see "The Complete Bidenisms."[more ...]
United States - Gmail - State visit - Vice president - Complete Bidenisms
- Slate wants your best ideas for how to live a cheaper, more energy-efficient life.
Slate wants your best ideas for how to live a cheaper, more energy-efficient life.[more ...]
- The Republicans' mistreatment of Sen. Robert Byrd in their fight against health care reform.
In the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen finds himself stuck in line next to a man pontificating about the scholar Marshall McLuhan. Unable to stand it, Allen interrupts and tells the man he's wrong. The pedant replies that he's a professor who teaches on the topic. Allen has the perfect retort. He steps out of the theater line and pulls from the wings McLuhan, who tells the man he's thoroughly incorrect and wonders aloud how he ever got a teaching position. Allen turns to the camera lamenting that life is never like this.[more ...]
- Rep. Eric Massa tickled his staff. Is that normal?
After more than 200 years, Congress has finally forced America to confront the question: Is it gay for one dude to tickle another dude? Freshman Rep. Eric Massa resigned Monday amid claims that he sexually harassed junior male aides. Appearing on Glenn Beck, Massa admitted that he "groped" a male staffer and "tickled him until he couldn't breathe" in their shared Washington townhouse. Larry King posed the inevitable question to Massa on Tuesday: "Are you gay?"[more ...]
- If a NASCAR driver died in a crash, would the racer who caused it be liable?
The car of NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski flipped over and crashed Sunday after another driver, Carl Edwards, bumped him during the Sprint Cup race in Atlanta. (Watch the video here.) Edwards admitted it was retaliation for a similar bump from Keselowski last April. NASCAR has put Edwards on probation for three races as punishment. What if Keselowski had been injured in the crash? Would Edwards be liable?[more ...]
- Slate's Whipometer: The latest on whether health care reform will pass.
As the health care reform debate enters the home stretch, Slate's crack research and development team is rolling out the Whipometer, a highly sensitive new instrument to measure the bill's chances of passage (which vary by the hour). Check here regularly for the latest on what the House, Senate, White House, and various other players are doing to shorten or lengthen the odds.[more ...]
- Bong Joon-Ho's new film, Mother, is terrific.
The films of the South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho operate like slyly constructed Rube Goldberg machines. His 2007 The Host, which made my list of 10 best films for that year, was a Godzilla-style monster movie that popped open to reveal a ghost story and a touching family drama hidden inside. Now, there's Mother, a Hitchcock-ian murder mystery that unfolds into a maternal melodrama worthy of Joan Crawford, shot through with bursts of black humor. Bong's ability to sustain three or four different tones in one movie without betraying the emotional truth of the story is nothing short of amazing: He can pat his head, rub his stomach, and break our hearts all at the same time.[more ...]
- Good wines for under $10.
As toddlers, both of my children were big Elmo fans. My daughter was especially enamored of "Limbo Elmo," an online game in which Elmo and some of his pals do the limbo while he sings a personalized version of the Chubby Checker hit, "Limbo Rock." Ava is now 5 and, like her older brother, she has outgrown her furry red friend. I have not. The sound of his scratchy voice warbling "Elmo nimble, Elmo quick, Elmo go under limbo stick" regularly pops into my head. Clearly, I am in need of an Elmo exorcism (that, or professional help). But the song did provide me with some excellent mood music during a recent visit to Total Wine & More in Wilmington, Del. I went there to perform a limbo of my own?to see how low I could go in price and still find something decent to drink. Back in May 2008, I wrote a column about $15 and under wines, all of which I procured from the same Total store, one of the retail giant's 64 locations nationwide. With "Elmo's Limbo Rock" as my mental soundtrack, the goal this time was to see what I could get for less than $10.[more ...]
- The best ideas generated at Slate's live discussion about "The Efficient Life."
Over the past several weeks, Daniel Gross has been leading "The Efficient Life," a crowdsourcing project to generate creative ideas about personal energy efficiency. Slate readers have submitted so many great ideas?500 of them so far?and comments that it emboldened us to try to do the same kind of crowdsourcing live, and with alcohol. So on Wednesday, March 10, more than 200 Slate readers, environmental and energy experts, and others gathered at the House of Sweden in Washington, D.C., for brainstorming and cocktails. The event began with a discussion among Slate and Newsweek columnist Daniel Gross, Department of Energy efficiency guru David Katz, Con Ed efficiency manager Mark Thomson, Natural Resources Defense Council building efficiency expert Lane Burt, and Grist.org. After that, we broke into small groups to try to generate ideas.[more ...]
- How to land a plane on a highway.
A curious, if generally underappreciated, feature of a highway or a road is that it sometimes becomes a runway.[more ...]
- All the news from American Idol.
Great music, it's said, can stop time. But our Idol time barreled forward headlong without a breath this week, with Ryan practically auctioneering his way through 16 90-second performances (OK, some of them did feel like 90 hours) so that Fox could continue flogging Human Target and reminding us that Glee still exists.[more ...]
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- Here's a surprise: AIG might pay back $170 billion of its $182 billion bailout.
AIG may be the only three-letter, four-letter word in the English language. The company ran into huge problems by selling insurance on financial assets without setting aside reserves to pay out claims. When the financial storm hit, no single private-sector company proved to be as messed up: The toxic issues surrounding its payments to Goldman Sachs on credit-default swaps, its absurd insistence on paying bonuses even as it racked up a $99 billion loss in 2008, the general lack of oversight by its executives. One number rankles above all: $182 billion?the total financial aid extended by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department to AIG.[more ...]
- The Political Gabfest for March 12, 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 ...]
- Why I hate wedding Web sites.
My roommate and I spent a solid hour on the couch one evening discussing a wedding Web site we'd been sent. The people getting married were strangers, but that didn't stop me from forwarding it to a friend or two I thought might get a kick out of it. Pretty soon everyone had seen "Jane" and "Tim's" site, on which they treated their impending nuptials with all the pomp that preceded Princess Diana's wedding. Except Jane and Tim's wedding won't just be broadcast live on their special day, like Diana's paltry event was. In the months preceding their marriage you can watch the Flash slide show that explains how the pair met-cute while rooting for opposing teams during a Yankees-Red Sox game as many times as you want. But that's only if you tire of the video showing Jane and Tim lovingly washing their dog, Mr. Snuffles.[more ...]
- Corrections from the last week.
In an item in the March 11 Slatest, Meredith Simon misidentified Republican Rep. Paul Ryan as a Democrat.[more ...]
- Could GPS create a world without signs?
Does the advent of GPS mean we'll no longer need them?[more ...]
- What would happen if people just refused to buy health insurance even if a law ordered them to?
The state of Virginia has a nutty new law prohibiting the federal government from compelling anyone in the commonwealth to purchase health insurance. Thirty-four other states are weighing similar laws nullifying health care reform's "individual mandate." Timothy S. Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee who favors passage of the bill, argues reassuringly in this essay on the New England Journal of Medicine's Web site that such challenges have no legal standing whatsoever. "We fought a war about that," Jost reminded me, "and the states lost." Jost is similarly reassuring about the constitutionality of the individual mandate itself. Like most legal scholars, he finds the argument in its favor "overwhelming" (though he concedes "it is hard to think of a direct precedent"). But Jost admits to some uncertainty about how easy it will be to enforce the individual mandate, citing two disquieting antecedents. The first is the "massive resistance" at the state level against 1954's Supreme Court school-desegregation decision (spearheaded, coincidentally, by a senator from Virginia). The second is California's defiance of 2005's Supreme Court ruling against the use of marijuana for medical purposes.[more ...]
- The Green Zone reviewed.
As the camera jerked and joggled its way through an impossible-to-follow action sequence late in The Green Zone (Universal), I found myself thinking: "Damn, I'm sick of faux-documentary-style hand-held cinematography. This feels like ersatz Paul Greengrass at its worst." Then I remembered: The Green Zone is directed by Paul Greengrass. The man whose raw, bare-bones style made the second two Bourne films such visceral action thrillers and who recreated the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in the difficult-to-watch United 93 (a movie that made me morally queasy but that was undeniably well-crafted) has turned his attention to the early days of the Iraq war. The script was adapted by Brian Helgeland from a book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and it reimagines the events of the spring of 2003 in a way that's analogous to Quentin Tarantino's feverish rewriting of the Second World War in Inglourious Basterds. What if, instead of all the awful shit that really, historically happened, some good guys had found a way to save the day?[more ...]
- What does whale taste like?
A Santa Monica, Calif., sushi restaurant has been charged with serving endangered whale meat to its customers. Two activists initiated the investigation by ordering kujira, Japanese for whale meat, then stuffing some into their napkins for transport to an Oregon laboratory. (The restaurant obligingly listed the order as "whale" on their receipt.) What does whale taste like?[more ...]
- Please, Mr. Denton, will you restore full-text RSS feeds to Gawker Media?
When Gawker Media truncated its RSS feeds a couple of days ago from full text to one-paragraph teasers and an invitation to click through to the whole article on the Web, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon resurrected his argument from 2007 to chastise Gawker boss Nick Denton for the new abbreviations.[more ...]
- An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily. From Obama to Jihad Jane.[more ...]
- Let's give contraceptive researchers their due.
It doesn't take a scientist to figure out that unprotected sex leads to babies. It does, however, take one to figure out how hormones in a 3-inch adhesive patch will cross layers of skin, muscle, and blood vessels before tweaking chemicals in the brain and ovaries to prevent pregnancy. For these contraceptive researchers, there's no real fame to be had, and the pay is just so-so. But after decades of struggling to win support from the scientific community, they've re-established themselves as a deserving craft with impressive developments that redefine conventional birth control.[more ...]
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- Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on Liz Cheney, Kathryn Bigelow, and why married people are too tired for sex.
Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on Liz Cheney, Kathryn Bigelow, and why married people are too tired for sex.[more ...]
- Hey, Charlotte, about that thing you wrote last night …
It's not as if I don't appreciate your efforts on my behalf. This must have taken all night, and it certainly looks beautiful up there, bedecked in morning dew and glistening. And?let's make this clear?I'm no writer. I could never do what you do. I simply am not literary. Illiterate is more like it, except for one or two pork-related words I've picked up around the pen. So, please, don't take this the wrong way, but I have a few notes.[more ...]
- Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Barack Obama inherited George W. Bush's war?not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the nation's public schools. Bush's battle plan was to criticize teachers' unions, increase the number of charter schools, and promote testing and accountability through No Child Left Behind, his signature legislation. Over the past year, Obama has done more than continue to prosecute his predecessor's war. In a surprise to many, he has quietly escalated it, even as the intelligence on which this war was founded has come under increasing scrutiny. If few have noticed, well, the country has been a little distracted by health care reform and the disastrous economy. But as Diane Ravitch argues in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, it's time we paid attention.Much has already been made of Ravitch's book, in which she has renounced her long-standing support of charter schools and NCLB. Her change of heart is notable because she is one of the nation's most serious and credible education scholars. In a career spanning four decades, she's written multiple histories and been an influential voice in policy debates, challenging both the reflexive right and left at different points over the years. But like a general who can no longer ignore the mounting casualties of a war she helped to propagate, she now argues the battle cannot be won under the current terms of engagement. In this sense, her book arrives with the force of the Pentagon Papers. Ravitch, of course, isn't revealing state secrets?but it sometimes seems as if she is, given how counter much of the evidence she presents runs to prevailing wisdom about education reform.[more ...]
- My wife got an STD but says she never cheated.
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 ...]
- How House Democrats can pass health care reform without voting for the health care bill.
President Obama has repeatedly called for an up-or-down vote on health care reform. But the only way House Democrats may be able to pass health care reform is by not holding an up-or-down vote. Follow me, Alice, and I'll try to explain.[more ...]
- Tinsley Mortimer's new reality show, High Society.
Tinsley Mortimer, a socialite presenting a compelling study in contemporary vulgarity, comes to reality television by way of Lawrenceville, the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, the Bal du Bois, the Columbia University chapter of St. A's, Condé Nast Publications, and the master's program in decorative arts at the Cooper-Hewitt. This is the résumé of a woman who has demonstrated impressive drive, who has enjoyed access to some of the world's finest institutions of learning, who at some point had some breeding. Devoting her time and talents to a very special cause, Tinsley has leveraged old-school social prominence into postmodern celebutante eminence, with shots of her bottle-blond head now regularly appearing in grubby gossip pages, slick society rags, and downtown trend pamphlets alike. The lady has achieved great success as a fame whore.[more ...]
- John Roberts' nonpartisan attack on presidential partisanship.
Chief Justice John Roberts is hopping mad at President Barack Obama for criticizing the Supreme Court during his January State of the Union speech. In fact, he's so mad, he had to fly all the way out to the University of Alabama School of Law to chide the president for his lack of decorum. See, now, that's the decorous way to criticize somebody. Via the Associated Press. From Alabama.[more ...]
- Science won't tell us what to do about climate change, but it can make the controversy worse.
Has anyone noticed that after 20 years and $25 billion in government-sponsored research on climate change, the political controversy over global warming is actually more intractable and bitter today than it has ever been in the past? Of course there are good reasons, such as the failure of the recent U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen climate conference, stubborn partisanship in the U.S. Congress, and recently discovered mistakes and distortions in the supposedly authoritative 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But these, like the tumors in a cancer patient, are symptoms of a mortal pathology, not its cause.[more ...]
- Will health reform's first political casualty be Mitt Romney?
Republicans are threatening that any Democrat who votes for the health care reform bill will pay the consequences in November. "Every election this fall will be a referendum on this bill," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said March 7 on ABC News' This Week. "Democrats think by passing the bill they'll be able to get it behind them and change the subject to something else like jobs," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told reporters March 8. "But this will do the opposite. This will make sure that health care is the No. 1 issue that the election is won or lost on in November."[more ...]
- Do newspapers ever correct a speaker's broken English?
The Wednesday New York Times article on Haisong Jiang, the man who inadvertently shut down Newark International Airport by slipping past security during the Christmas holidays, contains a quotation in broken English. Jiang, a Chinese native, told the Times: "I never face this situation before; I try to do my best to fix the problem." Are newspapers allowed to clean up quotations to make them grammatically correct?[more ...]
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- Slate Editor David Plotz and Daily Caller Editor Tucker Carlson chatted about Eric Massa, the al-Qaida 7, and "Jihad Jane." Read the transcript.
Slate Editor David Plotz and Daily Caller Editor Tucker Carlson discussed former Rep. Eric Massa's tickle fights, Liz Cheney's campaign against the al-Qaida 7, and "Jihad Jane"?the American woman arrested for plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist who mocked the prophet Mohammed. Read the transcript.[more ...]
- Lost: Vive le Linus!
Jack, Seth, please join me in a hearty cheer of "Vive Le Linus!" Although Ben may no longer be the emperor of the island, he proved last night that he's still the emperor of Lost. Since last season's finale, Michael Emerson has gradually turned Ben inside out, burying his machinations and exposing his vulnerabilities. It was most pronounced last week, when Ben stumbled across Sayid and his bloody dagger. Eyes wide and body erect, Ben scampered away like a squirrel hopped-up on Red Bull. This week he was less frenetic but just as wounded. It was an entire hour of Ben laid bare, so exhausted and weak that he allowed the other castaways?and the audience?to witness and prey upon his insecurities.[more ...]
- Slate's Culture Gabfest on the Oscars, the terrible signs at New York's Penn Station, and the National Enquirer's Pulitzer eligibility.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 77 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:[more ...]
- A baby starves to death while its parents play online.
It has come to this: A child starved to death while her parents cared for an imaginary child instead.[more ...]
- The at-home preservation trend.
Preserving food at home has become modish of late. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the New York Times have all noted the intense popularity of canning: overflowing classes, new cookbooks, obsessive blogs, and Twitter-publicized can-ins. Another, more concrete indication of the trend: sales of the Jarden Corporation's Ball glass canning jars are booming despite the recession: Its 2010 sales are up nearly 10 percent, and that's after a 2009 increase of 30 percent over 2008. It's cute that a practice once associated with grandmothers, 4-H-ers, zealous gardeners with too many cucumbers, and the occasional survivalist, is now a litmus test for gourmandism. But there's a revivalist fervor bottled up in those jars?enthusiasts tout the thriftiness, healthfulness, and environmental virtues of marmalades and dilly beans?that seems overwrought.[more ...]
- Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and why we're still fascinated by the Bauhaus.
Why we're still fascinated by it.[more ...]
- The bizarre religious roots of the abortion tweeter.
Angie Jackson, the Florida mother now known as the abortion tweeter, isn't the first woman to try to demystify abortion by talking about her story publicly. Since Romper Room personality Sherri Chessen got a very public abortion in 1962 after taking thalidomide, women have tried to erase the lingering shame of abortion by publicizing their own. Author Jennifer Baumgardner recently started the "I had an abortion" T-shirt project and a forthcoming Web site, ShareWithThree.org, that urges women to "come out" to three friends about their abortions.[more ...]
- Am I hurting my local public schools—and hurting America—by sending my kids to expensive private schools?
As fallout from the Great Recession continues to besiege families on all fronts, the cost of a private education is creating an exodus of students from private to public schools. In an April 2009 My Goodness column, Patty Stonesifer and Sandy Stonesifer addressed one parent's concern that sending her children to private school hurt local schools and her community. The original article is reprinted below.[more ...]
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- Why aren't Republicans raising holy hell about Obamacare's payroll tax hike?
Why aren't Republicans livid about Obamacare's proposed Medicare tax increase?[more ...]
- Rahm Emanuel can thank the president for the attention he's getting.
The blizzard of '10 in Washington might refer to February's record snowfall?or it might be a reference to the number of stories about White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. They've been everywhere you look lately. This Sunday, he'll be on the cover of the New York Times magazine. Next Sunday, he will be a part of a 60 Minutes story, along with his brothers Zeke and Ari.[more ...]
- The bogus Republican claim that Obamacare is a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy.
There have been lots of absurdities in the debate?such as it is?about health care reform. There's the hypocrisy of people dependent on government-run health care complaining about government-run health care. And now comes the Republican canard that the current health care reform proposal constitutes a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy. Here are Rep. Steve Buyer of Indiana, Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina making precisely that argument.[more ...]
- Health insurance in Theodore Roosevelt's America.
President Obama campaigned for health care reform Monday to a crowd at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania. Obama mentioned that he is reading a Theodore Roosevelt biography and that even T.R. lobbied for a health care overhaul during his 1912 "Bull Moose" presidential campaign. Was there health insurance in 1912?[more ...]
- Help Slate set some ground rules for cell phone etiquette.
Imagine you've just sat down to dinner with your spouse. Let's say it's a weeknight and there's nothing particularly special about this meal?you're at your own dining room table, neither one of you has slaved in the kitchen all day, and you don't have anything especially important to discuss. Halfway through dinner, your phone buzzes with a text message. Do you reach for it? And if so, do you reply?[more ...]
- Do you realize how much you could save if you insulated your house better?
Throughout this process of trying to make my home more energy efficient, I've been treating my house as a patient. The home energy assessment conducted by the Moldovan brothers was like triage. They conducted some tests, tightened a few things here and there, and made fixes that should improve the health of my energy bills. But they also noted that there was more to be done. And so I called in specialists who could give the house the equivalent of a CAT scan.[more ...]
- Advice for a woman who is concerned about her friend's attraction to her husband.
My friend's attraction to my hot husband freaks me out.[more ...]
- The forbidden game: China's on-again, off-again war against golf.
JIANSHAN VILLAGE, Zhejiang, China?Last November, when the Chinese government held a press conference to announce its most recent crackdown on illegal land use, it highlighted five investigations. Three involved heavy industry: a coking plant, a plastics factory, and a rare-earth metals mine. The other two were about golf courses, and they were the ones that made the headlines. "Golf defies rules to gain ground," screamed China Daily.[more ...]
- Are most emergency room visits really unnecessary?
Much of the ongoing health care reform debate has focused on unnecessary health care expenses?specifically, medical bills that rack up without demonstrably improving peoples' health. According to Peter Orszag, the director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, about $700 billion, or 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, is wasted on unnecessary care, such as extra costs related to medical errors, defensive medicine, and just plain fraud. At the center of this discussion are "unnecessary" ER visits for minor conditions?colds, headaches, and feverish babies?that could be handled more cheaply in doctors' offices. If we could only convince patients to take their stubbed toes to urgent-care clinics or primary-care offices instead of ERs, the thinking goes, we could save a load and help fix this whole health care fiasco.[more ...]
- Some tips for understanding the war on child obesity.
For years, we've heard that Americans are getting fatter. Two-thirds of adults are now classified as either overweight or obese, and we don't know how to reduce that number. Standard "treatments"?nutritional advice, exhortations to visit the gym, products from a $60 billion weight-loss industry?don't do much good over the long term, and more ambitious plans, like soda taxes and menu-labeling laws, might not work, either.[more ...]
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- How toxic is dry cleaning?
I live around the corner from a dry cleaner, but there's also a "green" dry cleaner on the other side of town. Am I total jerk if I keep going to my regular spot?[more ...]
- "Wait"
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Robert Wrigley read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..[more ...]
- Germany is tired of paying Europe's bills.
"Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And sell the Acropolis too!"?headline, Bild newspaper, March 4, 2010[more ...]
- History reveals a centuries-long authority to regulate guns. Shouldn't that matter?
During last week's oral argument in McDonald v. City of Chicago?the term's blockbuster gun law case?Justice Antonin Scalia was quick to move away from arguments about the Constitution's "text and history" and instead took solace in the judge-made "substantive due process" doctrine he has long attacked. Why was this champion of "originalism" so quick to embrace this modern and amorphous judicial doctrine, at the expense of his express preference for carefully considering the text and history of the 14th Amendment? Some scholars argue that it was to avoid relying on the 14th Amendment's "privileges or immunities clause" (which Scalia lambasted as "the darling of the professoriate"). But another possible reason for Scalia's move is that it's simply impossible to square his broad view of the right to bear arms with the history of the 14th Amendment itself. If the justices take a hard look at the actual history of gun regulation in America, then they will recognize that expansive gun rights vis-à-vis states and localities have never really had a place here.[more ...]
- A nasty attempt to coerce Danish newspapers into apologizing for the cartoons of Muhammad.
I have just finished reading one of the most astoundingly stupid and nasty documents ever to have landed on my desk. It consists of a letter from a law firm in Saudi Arabia, run by a man named Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to a group of newspapers in Scandinavia. I quote directly from its main paragraphs:[more ...]
- The dead end of Obama's no-nukes dream?
Remember Zero? As in zero nukes, Obama's dream. The dream of "a world without nuclear weapons." The path he sought to start us down in his famous (and probably Nobel-winning) Prague speech in April 2009. The speech in which he seemed consciously to echo Martin Luther King when he said that we might not get there "in my lifetime" but that we must set forth on the path. Thereby construing nuclear abolition as something akin to the abolition of human bondage, freeing us from the plutonium shackles of annihilating weaponry the way the original abolitionists ultimately succeeded in cutting the shackles of slavery.[more ...]
- Can California declare bankruptcy? What about Greece?
California passed a gas tax last week to help make up for its nearly $20 billion budget gap, the latest in a series of measures to right the state's teetering economy. The country of Greece is in even worse shape, with accumulated debt higher than 110 percent of GDP, set to reach 125 percent this year. Can a state declare bankruptcy? Can a country?[more ...]
- Eight reasons why the health-insurance industry should change its position and support reform.
The insurance industry is in the business of predicting the future, sifting through statistics about risk and then setting a price to insure against it. I wonder, however, whether the calculations that led it to oppose health care reform were actuarially sound. If the bill fails in Congress, health insurers will likely be worse off.[more ...]
- Oscars Dialogue: Gather ye Ringwalds.
Of age, of youth, of Oscar.[more ...]
- The big red word, the little green man, and the international war over exit signs.
The international war over exit signs.[more ...]
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- Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, for the week of March 8, 2010.
Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:[more ...]
- Dear Prudence chats live with readers at Washingtonpost.com.
Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon, everyone. I was so excited to see a crocus today![more ...]
- Slate now has an iPhone app.
You love your iPhone, but there has always been something ? missing. Perhaps it was that long car ride when you wished you had some "Political Gabfests" to listen to. Or maybe it was that three minutes before a meeting when the "Slatest" could have supplied the latest news. Or that 27-hour layover in O'Hare when you almost went insane listening to CNN and eating soft pretzels. How nice it would have been to have Slate in the palm of your hand.[more ...]
- A dissection of John Gottman's love lab.
"My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro," marriage researcher John Gottman once told an interviewer. "Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro." Gottman's own road to Velcro-level fame started with a 1998 article in the Journal of Marriage and the Family. He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman's team checked on the same couples' marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced.[more ...]
- Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Johnny Depp's latest adventure in gender-bending.
Has an A-list actor ever had a queerer career than Johnny Depp has? The former teen heartthrob and reigning Sexiest Man Alive gets credit for choosing "unconventional" roles, but here unconventional is code for "sexually ambiguous." Though his real-life sexuality has never been much of an issue (after a series of high-profile romances with starlets like Winona Ryder and Kate Moss, he's been with French actress Vanessa Paradis since the late '90s), Depp's big-screen sexual persona has always been remarkably fluid, emphasizing rather than overcoming his fine feminine features and approaching role after role as installments in a serial drag show. [more ...]
- How Slate readers fared in predicting the Oscars.
The 3,500 Slate readers who entered our Oscars prediction contest last week successfully predicted the winners of the top six categories and went 10 for 13 for the night. An aggregated lineup of 30 critics, meanwhile?and not to be too smug about it?got five of the top six correct, barely holding out for Avatar for best picture over The Hurt Locker, which took the honors.[more ...]
- Martha Nussbaum's From Disgust to Humanity.
New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.) Last month at the trial over California's ban on same-sex marriage, one witness who supported the measure testified that homosexuals are "12 times more likely to molest children." And recently, while addressing the proposed repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council warned Larry King if gay soldiers could serve in the military, "we might have to return to the draft" because other soldiers would refuse to serve. Perkins noted that he had showered together with 80 other men during his own time in the military, and he'd feel threatened by a gay man showering there with him.[more ...]
- The best and worst Oscar dresses.
Hanna Rosin: I really want to start with Charlize Theron'sreach-from-behind-and-grab-my-breasts dress, but that would be playing into her Björk-like agenda. Instead, I'll kick off with the dress I've been thinking about the most: Zoe Saldana's crystal-and-purple number. This Givenchy dress (from the Paris shows, apparently) echoed one of the main styles of the night: hard-structured metallic top matched with a waterfall-like bottom. I went back and forth on Saldana's version and ultimately decided it was awful. I think it's because that bottom reminded me of those cabbagelike flowers they plant around Washington in the winter. Also, when she walked, those poufs just got in the way. What did you guys think of it?[more ...]
- The selective crusade against black women's abortions.
"BLACK CHILDREN ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES," the billboards proclaim. Posted in dozens of locations in Atlanta's black neighborhoods, they direct readers to toomanyborted.com, a Web site that denounces abortion as a racist conspiracy. Through them, the pro-life movement is sending a message that it cares about the lives of black people. But does it?[more ...]
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- What Slate's writers and editors said about the Oscar telecast.
Slate sports editor Josh Levin, culture editor John Swansburg, foreign editor June Thomas, and other Slate writers and editors chatted live about the Academy Awards telecast. Read the transcript here.[more ...]
- Slate on the 82nd annual Academy Awards.
"Up in the Air: A slick Hollywood star vehicle dressed up by a mediocre filmmaker to look like an emblematic chronicle of our tough economic times," by Dennis Lim. Posted Friday, March 5, 2010.[more ...]
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