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• Slate V:
• The pros give productivity advice to the presidential candidates. Presidential candidates try to connect with voters in different ways. They bowl. They attend motorcycle rallies. Sometimes they drink boilermakers. They do not, as a general matter, discuss time-management strategies. In a campaign, as in real life, such talk tends to make people wonder about you.[more ...]
• Paris for President The best of Web video.[more ...]
• Even John McCain thinks you should inflate your tires. Even John McCain thinks you should inflate your tires.[more ...]
• Harming farming. Last week, the Doha Development Round of global trade negotiations collapsed. Some of the stickiest points involved agricultural trade: Third World governments refused to open their markets further to exports from the European Union and the United States, citing the need to protect small farmers, who make up 75 percent of the world's poor. But just why are these Third World farmers suffering? We've been hearing for years that cheap food makes it tough for them to make a profit. But food's not so cheap anymore: Global food prices have increased 26 percent from 2004 to 2007, according to the World Bank, and are expected to remain above 2004 levels at least through 2015. Now that we're all paying higher prices at the grocery store?meaning more visits to food pantries or fewer to Whole Foods, depending on your situation?shouldn't the farmers' fortunes be improving?[more ...]
• Dude, you stole my article. The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston. "I believe your ? profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts That Make the Holiday a Time to Party" by Mark Williams, a feature pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolons?a hallmark, I would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was largely unaltered. For example, my Slate piece began this way:[more ...]
• Slate on China and the Beijing Olympics. A roundup of Slate's coverage of China and the Beijing Games.[more ...]
• Can the Speedo LZR Racer make me a better swimmer? When I first started swimming competitively, in junior high, we took pride in the sheer, tattered swimsuits we'd wear layered one atop another for extra drag in practice. It was, after all, the Flashdance era, when droopy layers had no small cachet. But come meet day, we'd do anything to be sleek?shave our legs and squeeze ourselves into too-tight Lycra suits, at the time still a newish technology. The goal was to minimize turbulence and to maximize forward momentum in the water. If the look intimidated a few competitors, so much the better.[more ...]
• The last word on Clark Rockefeller. (Maybe.) Plus, why not Kathleen Sebelius for VP?[more ...]
• Can you stockpile gasoline when prices are cheap? Gas prices dropped to an average $3.871 a gallon on Tuesday after a two-week stretch of declining prices. Is it possible to stockpile cheap gas before the prices go up again?[more ...]
• Pineapple Express reviewed. Pineapple Express is this summer's precise equivalent to Superbad: a Judd Apatow-produced buddy comedy directed by a proxy from the indie world (last time around, it was The Daytrippers' Greg Mottola; this time it's All the Real Girls' David Gordon Green). Both movies follow three marginally functional man-boys through a day and night of substance-abuse-related mayhem. The two movies were even released in the same part of the season, as a dog-days follow-up to the big Apatow comedy of early summer (in 2007, Knocked Up; this year, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).[more ...]
• Damned Spot: Drilling McCain on Oil A daily video from Slate V.[more ...]
• The Audio Book Club on Brideshead Revisited. To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, click the arrow on the player below.[more ...]
• Stocks roar back. A combination yesterday of falling commodity prices and the Federal Reserve holding its nerve helped alleviate the fear of inflation and sent Wall Street soaring, with the Dow Jones Industrial index jumping 330 points, its biggest one-day gain in more than four months. Traders came not to praise commodities but to bury them and, with oil wounded by the dagger of decreasing global demand (crude futures have lost 5 percent in value in the last two days, closing at $119.17 a barrel) and the Fed holding interest rates at 2 percent, the markets dreamed once more of cheaper gas and easing inflation, as the Wall Street Journal reports.[more ...]
• FriendFeed crawls Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube so you don't have to. No, I don't want to use Twitter. I'm way too busy?and, let's be honest, too uninterested (and uninteresting)?to spend all day thumb-typing status updates from my cell phone. That's the problem with Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and the rest: They expect me to eagerly upload, type, click, and tweet my life onto the Internet so these tidbits can be served to others. What I really want is to be able to reap the advantages of these sites without having to lift a finger?to see what my friends are up to without having to write anything myself.[more ...]
• On the front lines of the global food crisis. LUDHIANA, PUNJAB, India?India has never been able to feed all its people.  Even when it has produced plenty of food, an inefficient distribution system that allowed tons of grain to rot in storage barns, coupled with abject poverty, ensured that people went hungry. India shamefully boasts the world's largest population of malnourished children. Still, most people believe that the situation would have been much worse if yields in Punjab had not risen as dramatically as the country's population. If a single institution can take credit for bringing the Green Revolution to Punjab, it is Punjab Agricultural University.[more ...]
• Beyond the Great Wall showcases recipes from China's ethnic minorities. At first glance, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China looks much like every other expensive cookbook: a weighty, glossy tome that's large enough to be a coffee table by itself. But look again: It isn't until the end of the book's lengthy introduction, after a lesson on the geography and peoples of China's periphery, after a centerfold of maps and a page of language family trees, that any mention of food appears. And even if you only skim authors Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's opening remarks about how "three-fifths of the land area we now call China is historically the home of people who are not ethnically Chinese" and how "non-Han China" is "most frequently on the short end," you'll realize that this cookbook isn't just about perfectly fried Uighur pastries with pea tendrils.[more ...]
• China's youth discovers the identity crisis. "My youth began when I was twenty-one. At least, that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life?some of them might possibly be for me." These opening sentences of Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, a semiautobiographical novel by one of China's young expatriate stars, 35-year-old filmmaker and writer Xiaolu Guo, have the sound of a generational mantra. Ask pianist Lang Lang, the 26-year-old virtuoso who will be performing at the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday and who has produced a ghost-written memoir (two, actually: a young-adult version and another for grown-ups) timed for the occasion. He, too, has lately been making up for a lost childhood. Chief among the youthful indulgences he and Guo's narrator, Fenfang, tardily seize on is one that an older Chinese generation doesn't begin to grasp: the thrilling pursuit of self-discovery.[more ...]
• Let's get rid of August. August is upon us?a month of nasty weather, thin news, and nonevents in the entertainment industries. In a 2001 "Assessment" reprinted below, David Plotz made the case for August Reform, a plan that would cede some of August's days to July and others to September, leaving a truncated version of "that most useless month."[more ...]
• A good grilling. A good grilling.[more ...]
• Sweaty subtext. Sweaty subtext.[more ...]
• Cartoonists' take on sports. Cartoonists' take on sports.[more ...]
• Eleven men from five countries are charged in the biggest identity theft case in history. The Los Angeles Times leads with, and the Wall Street Journal fronts, news that federal prosecutors have charged 11 men in five countries with stealing more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from U.S. retailers. The Justice Department said it is the largest identity theft prosecution in history and was the result of a three-year investigation that tied together what were previously thought to be separate attacks that had been reported by retailers in recent years. The New York Times leads with a new report by the Government Accountability Office that details how the Iraqi government is making a handsome profit out of the rising oil prices, but continues to spend only a tiny percentage of that on reconstruction projects. By the end of the year, Iraq could have a budget surplus of as much as $79 billion, but most of it is likely to end up sitting in banks while the United States has appropriated approximately $48 billion for reconstruction projects since the invasion.[more ...]
• The often astonishing From G's to Gents. The most dynamic subgenre of reality television is the caste-climbing makeover competition, and its essential text is Ladette to Lady, canceled this year after three delightful seasons on the U.K.'s ITV. The program endeavored to instill aristocratic values in its young female contestants who were commoners plucked from a newfound segment of the commonalty. The girls tended to look like a football hooligan's idea of a trollop, and any club-chair sociologist could see that the ladettes had realized the constraints of the local class system and had chosen to opt out of it. Instead, the ladettes established a pseudo-subculture and careered around the kingdom like a roaming gang of slags, taking shelter wherever the sound of Oasis being played very loud was coincident with lager on tap. In the last episode of each season of Ladette to Lady?the reliably precious finishing-school graduation scene?the winner made a kind of debut. She was alleged to know both self-respect and how to set a formal dinner, and we were encouraged to believe that both pieces of knowledge mattered to her moral improvement. She entered small-S society.Matters of class are rather less straightforward on these colonial shores, as evidenced by American Princess (WE). That one whisks its contestants away from Sacramento, Calif., and Pittsburgh to drill them on carriage and elocution in Ye Olde Country. The host is the actress Catherine Oxenberg, who descends from the Gluckburg branch of the House of Oldenburg. No less important, Oxenberg played both Amanda Carrington on Dynasty and the Spencer girl in The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982). She exists at the distant temporal end of the contestants' knowledge of history. Their ideas about nobility and its obligations all come from Disney films, People magazine, and beauty pageants. Their class consciousness was but a vague set of insecurities and shopping lists. They entered the show already having won the big prize of getting to hold court on TV; the winner also gets a "title of nobility" of the kind you can usually find on eBay for, maybe, $300. Then she gets to lord that over her friends back home.This summer, From G's to Gents (MTV, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) has pimp-rolled exuberantly onto the scene, a carnival about hip-hop culture, black masculinity, preppies, and power. What is a G, you ask? A G is a straight gangsta, dawg. One contributor to Urban Dictionary appraises them as "the most ruthless niggaz on the block." A G can be of any race or ethnicity, but he must take it upon himself to embody a black stereotype. I'm kind of thinking of a cross between King Kong and old-school Ice Cube.The man shaping these outcasts up is Fonzworth Bentley, a Morehouse man who parlayed a job in retail at Polo first into a gig as P. Diddy's valet and then into a secure station in the hip-hop world. Some of his suits are frightfully lovely, though his daytime handkerchiefs can sometimes be a bit too natty, know what I'm saying. The conceit of the show is that Bentley (né Derek Watkins) is the "president and founder" of a "gentleman's club." The club is said to be "prestigious." I would also add that the club is highly exclusive, as Bentley seems to be the only person in it. He is helped by Fredrick, a black butler, laconic and sardonic: Jeeves by way of Benson.Bentley's overall philosophy of a gentleman's responsibilities is quite similar to Millicent Fenwick's as expressed in Vogue's Book of Etiquette (1948), with the obvious exception of Mrs. Fenwick's attitude toward empty celebrity: "Publicity for its own sake is not always approved by good usage." No matter. The man is going to find a thug with a heart of gold. Each of the 14 G's is a "pledge" who wears a club jacket with a crestlike insignia seemingly inspired by a label on a bottle of fortified wine. In a weekly twist, they are each given an "ebony sphere" with which to nominate other contestants for elimination, which isn't how we used to do it but does yield some good noisy beefs and energetic "alliance" story lines. Of course, it's difficult?what with the insurance-company bonding and the parole officers and all?to sign actual criminal sociopaths up for a reality show. Some of the G's are just low-class clowns, and many of these had already been eliminated going into the fourth episode. Consider Pretty Ricky from San Diego, Calif., for instance. It wasn't looking good for him from the moment when, drunk on hard liquor one night at the clubhouse, he took a piss against a wall. Then there was The Truth?a name only a bullshitter would contrive for himself; he was not a G, just a mouthy punk. In contrast, Mikey P. suffered for being a total poser. He lost significant street cred when he said he'd just bought a four-bedroom house in Mercer County, N.J.No, the G to watch is Creepa, who's a mutant breed of super G, a goon. "You know what a goon is?" he asked the other G's, not quite rhetorically. "A goon's somebody that's hired to terrorize and defeat!" Creepa as much as lists his occupation as "hustla." Creepa calls his sunglasses "hater-blockers," and he leaves them on all the time, owing to all the jealous haters out there. But then, during a one-on-one in the brandy room with Bentley, he shed the shades and lifted his eyes in a decent approximation of sincerity: "In order to be successful, you gotta be ready to broaden your horizons." Creepa's heart, like his teeth, is made of gold. He brought a lot of energy to both the fashion challenge?where the G's choose outfits to wear to charity events on yachts?and to the cricket lesson as well. Will he be able make his way through a high-society fantasy without assimilating and selling out his inner G? He is, after all, a lot more comfortable with this kind of cultural passing than, say, J. Boogie. Also recently eliminated, J. Boogie was not a G in the slightest, but a kind of B-boy fashion victim on the slum. (Fruit-colored high-tops, buzzy mohawk.) The giveaway came when J. Boogie reported being employed as an office assistant and strained to make the job sound tough in the street-corner sense: "I'm axually workin' in a lab'atory." Bentley saw that the young man would be able to advance in life without the assistance of his gentleman's club: "J. Boog, your membership has been denied. Please remove your blazer."[more ...]
• Did Bruce Ivins' therapist have to tell authorities that her patient was a homicidal sociopath? The psychotherapist who treated Bruce E. Ivins, the deceased suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, told a Maryland court on July 24 that her patient was a "sociopathic, homicidal" maniac who planned to kill his co-workers and that he had "attempted to murder several people" using poison as far back as 2000. Did she have to drop a dime on her patient, or could she have kept quiet?[more ...]
• Wal-Mart's clumsy, self-defeating attempts to influence the election. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that retailing giant Wal-Mart, concerned about a potential Democratic sweep this fall, has been not-so-subtly indoctrinating managers and department heads about the perils of an Obama presidency. The operating assumption in Bentonville seems to be that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress would pass laws such the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize at Wal-Mart, thus hurting the company, its workers, and its shareholders. And while the executives running the meetings were careful not to instruct workers which lever to pull, the upshot was clear. "I am not a stupid person," a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor told the Journal. "They were telling me how to vote."[more ...]
• The best (and worst) travel gear for parents. For the past few years, my family has temporarily divided its time between Texas (where I grew up and have been working on a book) and New York (my home, where I've lived for nearly two decades). As a result, my 4-year-old daughter and I frequently fly between the heartland and the East Coast and to other destinations far-flung.[more ...]
• What's new in Portfolio, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and more. Weekly Standard, Aug. 11The cover story observes the "growing class of Hollywood conservatives" who are launching a "frontal attack on the excesses of the American left. ?" A group of Tinseltown righties, including David Zucker, are reigniting "hope that conservatives will have a battalion in this exceedingly influential battleground of the broader culture war." ? An article parses Obama's Hyde Park Herald op-eds to examine the period referred to as the senator's "lost years"? between his first state Senate run and his first U.S. Senate campaign. Written between 1996 and 2004, the columns show "a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician ? purveyed by [his] campaign." In fact, they portray a "politician ? [who is] profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan." ? A piece derides the "tiresome feminist complaining" of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recently published memoir.[more ...]
• The pro-life case against birth control, nursing, and exercise. Secretary Michael O. LeavittDepartment of Health and Human Services200 Independence Avenue, SWWashington, DC 20201[more ...]
• Obama is all alone in the Buckeye State, holding two town halls in northeastern Ohio. He's all alone in the Buckeye State, holding two town halls in northeastern Ohio.[more ...]
• Bookmark: Pressure Kicker A daily video from Slate V.[more ...]
• Philip Pan's Out of Mao's Shadow. Making sense of the momentous change taking place in China has never seemed more pressing, or more impossible. Even the most knowledgeable observers of the Middle Kingdom now have a hard time agreeing on where the country is headed or what China's rise portends. If you read the business press, filled with stories about the Chinese economic juggernaut, you would believe that China is rewriting the laws of economics and will continue to grow forever. If you follow the annual Pentagon reports on Chinese military power, China seems to be replacing the former Soviet Union as America's "peer competitor," soon to challenge U.S. supremacy. But if you care to look at the countless books and articles about China's internal transformation since the end of the Cultural Revolution, you would be totally confused.[more ...]
• Ji Chaozhu's The Man on Mao's Right. The title seems to promise a timely exposé in the age of the tell-all memoir, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics and China's bid for global openness: The Man on Mao's Right: From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China's Foreign Ministry. All the ingredients of privileged insight are on display: proximity to power, a hint of American savvy, a grim domestic reference, a promise of foreign intrigue. But open Ji Chaozhu's memoir, and you'll discover a very different kind of document, more of a memo to the grandkids than to history. As witness to a half-century of Chinese turmoil, at home and abroad, he says surprisingly little that is not already known. The revelation here is of how persistent the tell-nothing ethos of a totalitarian era can be. Ji isn't alone in hoping against hope that discretion, rather than dissension, might somehow pave the way to more openness.[more ...]
• Revisiting Robert Drew's groundbreaking John F. Kennedy documentaries. Is there a less spontaneous creature than the contemporary politician? Surrounded by banks of TV cameras, candidates have been trained to stay on script, follow stage directions, and play it safe, lest YouTube claim another scalp. The race itself may hold surprises, but presidential campaigns stick to the photo-op playbook?glad-handing in the New Hampshire snow, visits to Midwestern diners, stopovers at Rust Belt bars. The campaign has become not so much a breaking story captured by cameras as a choreographed production put on for their benefit.[more ...]
• Is your Netflix queue destroying the environment? My family just got Netflix, and the first DVD we rented was An Inconvenient Truth (really). As we watched the film, I started getting pangs of regret: The movie was surely sitting on the shelf at my local video store, and here we were getting it delivered from hundreds of miles away. Is my Netflix queue destroying the environment?[more ...]
• "The Intention of Things" A weekly poem, read by the author.[more ...]
• Sadr wants to turn militia into a social-services organization; Freddie Mac ignored warnings. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with word that Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr plans to order his Mahdi Army militia to drop their weapons so it can be transformed into a civic and political organization. If the move is successful it would mean that what was once one of the main groups fighting against American forces in Iraq that was seen as an instigator for civil war would effectively disappear. The New York Times leads with word that Freddie Mac's chief executive was warned repeatedly over the last few years that steps had to be taken in order to protect the mortgage giant's financial health. Of course, the warnings were ignored. The company's former chief risk officer tells the NYT that he wrote a memo to the chief executive, Richard Syron, in 2004, where he warned that the company was buying too many risky loans that could translate into huge losses.[more ...]
• Beware of Cheap Oil Oil plummets and America rejoices! Right? Well, not quite. Certainly crude prices seem to be headed south, closing around $120 on Monday and raising the prospect of pump prices dropping below $4 a gallon. But as Fortune.com makes clear, "falling oil prices also suggest that the recession the U.S. has so far avoided is well on its way."[more ...]
• The case for covering the Edwards scandal. Why write about the Edwards scandal? Here's a short clip-and-save response to those (including many friends) who argue the Edwards scandal shouldn't be pursued--or at least pursued too vigorously-- even if it is true:**[more ...]
• How The Gulag Archipelago changed the world. Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript?the first historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system?before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn's sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose?not an experience anyone was likely to forget.[more ...]
• Three questions to ask your search engine. Last Monday morning, the search engine Cuil launched with great fanfare. By Monday afternoon, it had completely tanked. Users who test-drove the would-be Google rival were quick to complain about mismatched articles and thumbnail photos; the poor breadth of results; obvious queries that turned up blank; and even, in a moment of true existential crisis, the site's inability to locate itself.[more ...]
• When "skinny" means "black." In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.[more ...]
• Will voters buy McCain's hypocritical ads? Last week the McCain campaign was roundly criticized, even among some of his Republican allies, for running several misleading ads about Barack Obama. Many voters seemed to agree: A CNN poll showed that four in 10 thought McCain had attacked Obama unfairly.[more ...]
• Finally, the Army is promoting the right officers. Last November, when Gen. David Petraeus was named to chair the promotion board that picks the Army's new one-star generals, the move was seen as, potentially, the first rumble of a seismic shift in the core of the military establishment.[more ...]
• Microsoft's strange, passive-aggressive "Mojave Experiment." In mid-July, representatives of Microsoft traveled to San Francisco in search of people who hated Windows Vista. The company recruited 140 Mac and PC users who thought Microsoft's latest operating system was slow, that it crashed constantly, that it was incompatible with various devices, and that installing it would be a pain. None of these people had ever used Vista; they'd only heard from others that it sucked. When they were asked to watch a short demonstration of a brand-new Microsoft operating system called Windows Mojave, the Vista-haters were blown away. The new OS was quick and pretty, it handled photos and videos and music with aplomb, and it never crashed. "Why didn't you guys release this instead of that Vista crap?" many wondered.[more ...]
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008. Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become?and had been before?a prisoner there.[more ...]
• More on the Los Angeles fast-food moratorium. Lots of backtalk to Thursday's piece about the fast-food moratorium in Los Angeles. The conversation is turning into a progressive-libertarian slugfest. My bad: I laid on the outrage a bit thick. I really am shocked that the L.A. City Council unanimously voted to treat fast food just like alcohol or tobacco. But I don't want the crossing of that line to be obscured by a larger ideological quarrel. So let's back up and focus on exactly what's new here.[more ...]
• Goodbye Subprime, Hello Prime Anyone looking for a bold move by U.S. and European central banks this coming week is likely to be disappointed. Amid slowing global growth and continued high inflation, "the outlook confronting policymakers remains grim," writes the Financial Times.[more ...]
• The 10 oddest travel guides ever published. "After five years' travel," veteran guidebook writer Geoff Crowther once recalled, "most of us went feral." So did the books they wrote. Jammed into backpacks, ripped into pieces, guidebooks escape into the wild to get lost or abandoned for the next edition. Here are 10 that are so transfixingly odd that they've remained readable long beyond their original itineraries:[more ...]
• Homeowners with good credit are increasingly having trouble keeping up with payments. The New York Times leads with a look at how troubles in subprime mortgages could be just the beginning of a much wider crisis. Even as there are signs that the increase in defaults among those with weak credit is slowing down, there are hints that homeowners with good credit are now increasingly in trouble. The Washington Post leads with a look at how insurance companies are beginning to use electronic data that contain details on the prescription drug records of millions of Americans in order to build a "health 'credit report.'"  The use of these databases is only expected to increase as the country begins its transition toward electronic medical records.[more ...]
• The New York Times reports on American hospitals' private deportations. The New York Times leads with American hospitals engaging in their own form of deportation?sending injured illegal immigrants back to their homeland because no American healthcare provider will accept uninsured aliens. The Washington Post leads with doubts about Bruce Ivins, the scientist who killed himself this week before being indicted by the FBI in an investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Friends and colleagues describe Ivins as a content man without the means or motive to carry out deadly chemical attacks. Online, the Los Angeles Times leads with another installment of its 2008 Summer Olympics countdown, a personal essay by an LAT correspondent who was born in Beijing.[more ...]
• The nation's financial industry is cratering, so how come Hudson City Bank is thriving? "If you look to the right, you can see New York City," says Ronald Hermance Jr., CEO of Hudson City Bancorp, as he points out the fourth-floor window of the company's boxy headquarters in unglamorous Paramus, N.J. I had to venture through traffic to this distinctly nonimperial corporate redoubt 17 miles west of the George Washington Bridge?it's just past a union building and across the street from a garden supply center?in my quest to find a sensible banker in the New York area. Despite the proximity to Manhattan, Hermance and his 140-year-old bank have never been part of the fast-money Wall Street scene. And thanks to its geographic and cultural distance, this bridge-and-tunnel bank has thrived amid the mortgage debacle.[more ...]
• The best reads to prepare for the Olympics. Every four years, Americans turn away briefly from our regular summer sporting obsessions?pennant races, NFL training camps, the PGA Championship, and NASCAR?and become experts on otherwise-ignored sports like gymnastics, swimming, track, and the modern pentathlon. Keeping up with water-cooler conversation requires some advance reading.[more ...]
• Is the anthrax case solved now? Everyone leads with follow-up stories on the suicide of Bruce Ivins, a government researcher who was about be charged with mailing anthrax to government and media figures back in 2001. Ivins died from an overdose of codeine and Tylenol last Tuesday, just hours before his attorneys were scheduled to have a plea bargain meeting with investigators.[more ...]
• What's really killing newspapers: They're no longer the best providers of social currency. The last thing the unwell newspaper industry needs is another diagnosis of what ails it?so here goes![more ...]
• Slate on Day to Day for the week of July 28. Slate stories on NPR's Day to Day.[more ...]
• It was always all about the judges. Yet another tough week in the legal universe as dreamed up by the Bush administration.[more ...]
• The Boston Red Sox and Manny Ramirez say their goodbyes. I was driving home late in the last afternoon of the Manny Ramirez Era in Boston, listening to the local ESPN radio outlet, when, suddenly, it seemed that the two hosts had decided that what the situation called for was the opinion of Margaret Hamilton's character from The Wizard of Oz.[more ...]
• What's new in the Economist, the Believer, Time, and more. New York Times Magazine, Aug. 3An article enters the morally murky realm of "trolls," a term that describes a usually anonymous person "who intentionally disrupts online communities." Since the Web has burgeoned into a "mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others" rife with discussion boards and social-networking sites, "[t]rolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt." ? A piece reveals that the solution to traffic congestion lies with army ants, "the earth's most accomplished commuters." They manage "to get from one place to another in large groups without cutting each other off, deciding their time is more valuable than everybody else's, or?apparently this is the fast-lane domination method for certain traveling land crickets?eating anybody who gets in the way." Lessons from the animal kingdom include making sure drivers move at an even pace, stay in their own lanes, and allow enough space for would-be mergers to enter smoothly. (Slate V also looked at research into ants solving traffic jams recently.)[more ...]
• Decoding "platypus bottom," the newest animal metaphor on Wall Street. Friday morning on CNBC, UBS's trading-floor czar Art Cashin was asked whether he thought the markets had bottomed out. Rather than offer a tried-and-true business cliché about bulls and bears, Cashin got creative. It "might be more of a platypus bottom," he said. Come again?[more ...]
• Go see Man on Wire. In the middle of the night on Aug. 7, 1974, a French high-wire artist named Philippe Petit broke into the just-built World Trade Center with a small band of accomplices. As dawn was breaking, the men strung a cable between the Twin Towers, upon which Petit proceeded to walk for 45 minutes, crossing back and forth eight times as he danced, knelt, and lay down on the wire. Afterward, he was arrested, subjected to psychiatric evaluation (Q: "Why did you do this?" A: "There is no why"), and released. His community-service sentence: to perform a second, legal high-wire walk in Central Park for the children of New York City.[more ...]
• Pam: Girl on the Loose reviewed. The most striking visual element of Pam: Girl on the Loose (E!, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET)?setting aside the pinup figure of Pamela Anderson, itself a major work of contemporary popular art?is the texture of the light. The creators of this eight-part "docu-series" made a decision to employ some particular film stock or trick of postproduction and relay Anderson's doings in shocking tones of pale. The images first grab the eye, then try to strain it. Though the look happens to be richly evocative?of Malibu glare, platinum-blond bling, stargazing gauziness, New Age celestial radiance, and flashbulb blaze?one suspects the real intent is to wash out whatever lines and blemishes exist on the face and frame of the star, who just turned 41. Or else it's a visual pun on the idea of overexposure.[more ...]
• Israel's political vacuum. To the American spectator, the parallels with Israel seem obvious. The departing leader is unpopular and scarred by an unsuccessful war. For the time being, the focus is on the primaries in which two candidates are vying for the leadership of the Kadima Party. One is a woman, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. The other is the "dark-skinned candidate," Transportation Minister and former Defense Minister and military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, a member of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, none of whose members has ever been prime minister.[more ...]
• Republicans are trying to depict Obama as a pompous, out-of-touch snob. As surely as the swallows come back to Capistrano, the political class has returned to one of its favorite diversions: deciding which past presidential candidates the current presidential candidates most resemble.[more ...]
• Slate's Political Gabfest for Aug. 1. Listen to Slate's review of the week in politics.[more ...]
• Can I sell you a bridge in Brooklyn? New York state "may have to sell off roads, bridges and tunnels" to address a growing budget deficit, the New York Post reported Wednesday. How would you go about selling someone a bridge in Brooklyn?[more ...]
• The trouble with older kindergarten. At what age should children go to kindergarten? At what age should your child go to kindergarten? What if these questions appear to have different answers?[more ...]
• Wall-E's plant apocalypse, seen from a botanist's point of view. Yes, it's charming and thought-provoking and amazing. But for those of us in the green world, the really striking thing about the animated film Wall-E is that a plant is the object of desire, the grail, the Ark of the Covenant. This happens so rarely in movies. (One exception is an obscure but admirable satire, released a couple of years ago, called Idiocracy, in which the hero teaches really dumb people on an apocalyptic future Earth that plants need to be properly tended so that people will have food to eat and air to breathe.)[more ...]
• Corrections from the last week. In the July 30 "Moneybox," Daniel Gross included a significant numerical error. The piece linked to a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report, which can be seen here, that shows public construction spending on roads and highways in monthly totals. That Census Bureau reports the data as monthly totals expressed at an annualized rate. Because we read that annual rate as a monthly rate, the original article overstated public spending on highways and roads by a factor of 12.[more ...]
• Happy Birthday, Credit Crisis The credit crisis turns one this month, Business Week writes. What can you say? Certainly not "Many Happy Returns," given that the latest government data shows the economy is contracting so quickly that a number of economists now believe "that a recession began late last year." Even though President George W. Bush (and the Washington Post) pointed out that gross domestic product rose at a 1.9 percent annualized rate (after adjusting for inflation) during the second quarter, newly revised data showed "the economy contracted at a 0.2% rate in the final three months of 2007," notes the Wall Street Journal. We'll get another barometer today on the potential effects of the credit crunch's terrible twos might be when the Bush administration offers up its latest job market forecast. Analysts suggest 75,000 jobs were lost in July, "signifying the seventh straight month of declines," notes the New York Times.[more ...]
• A scientist commits sucide just as he was about to face charges on anthrax attacks. The Los Angeles Times leads with word that a government scientist who was about to face charges for the 2001 anthrax attacks apparently committed suicide. Bruce Ivins, 62, a "skilled microbiologist," worked at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md. for the last 18 years and, according to people who knew him, had been informed of his impending prosecution. Ivins helped the government investigate the anthrax mail attacks that took place shortly after Sept. 11, 2001 and killed five people.  The New York Times leads with word that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that members of Pakistan's intelligence service helped militants plan the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan last month that killed more than 50 people. The link had long been suspected, but intercepted communications finally brought confirmation.[more ...]
• Swing Vote reviewed. Swing Vote (Touchstone Pictures) isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures. What little bite it manages to apply against the American electoral system is fake, to be removed at will whenever a truly chewy topic comes up. Some of the issues the movie gums include abortion, immigration, and the unacknowledged alcoholism of its own main character.[more ...]
• Cheerleaders, go-go girls, and Hollywood starlets. The great joke about the original movies on Lifetime, the grande dame of gynocentric cable channels, is that they present unvarying visions of women as victims?pap weepies about cancer and kidnapping or plump melodramas about awful men. No one has made this joke better than the satirists at the Onion, which once reported that wife murderer Scott Peterson was "issued a Lifetime Channel sentence during the penalty phase of his trial" and elsewhere imagined such fare as the "Emotional Manipulation Hour" and "The Abused Wife Who Didn't Mean To Kill Her Policeman Husband in Self-Defense." But the times, they do change, and the network's new slate of Saturday-night movies sees those melodramas getting a moderate makeover. Bright and loud and sort of peewee post-feminist, this is your daughter's Lifetime, belatedly curtsying to the culture of Us Weekly, girl power, and hooking up.We begin with Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal (Saturday at 9 p.m. ET), based on some nonsense that transpired two years ago in the town of McKinney. The new cheerleading coach found herself outgunned by the squad's most imperious clique, students more powerful than administrators. They misbehaved, got drunk rather ostentatiously, and flouted both school rules and "the cheerleader constitution." The coach, daring to challenge them, got fired. The scenario would seem to call for a John Waters kind of treatment, with tons of fun sadism and salacious kitsch, and Lifetime, within its sappy limits, delivers this?a corruption of the uplifting-teacher plot. The outfits pop with outré color, and the girl-on-girl violence is quite lively. Tatum O'Neal, having developed into a fine camp figure, sells her performance as a cheerleader mom (also the school's principal) whose main concern about her daughter's boozing is that there's enough tequila left over for her to make a decent margarita. Everyone learns an important lesson in the end, of course, but the naughtiness presented along the way intends to thrill.The same dynamic is at work in True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet (Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. ET), which stars young pop singer Joanna "JoJo" Levesque. It cannot be a coincidence that Levesque's pinchable cheeks and squeezable chin closely resemble those of Lindsay Dee Lohan. Her character, Morgan Carter, is a hard-drinking movie star. In lieu of a proper stint in rehab, Morgan takes refuge in Fort Wayne, Ind., which certainly does sound sobering. Morgan's guardian is her aunt Trudy, played by Valerie Bertinelli, who, with Meredith Baxter and Judith Light, was a mainstay of the old Lifetime and thus serves as a link between the network of old and this odd new thing, which simultaneously celebrates glamour and valorizes us regular folk.The premise is that Morgan slips into a public high school incognito, assuming an identity as just your average transfer student and keeping up the ruse well into the film's second act. That she's able to pull this off is an affront to the tabloid literacy of kids today, but whatever; we get to cock our heads at the sight of a Lohan figure enduring the taunts of mean girls and to play along as she develops a crush on a thoughtful young man (She: "You don't watch reality TV?!" He: "No, I read."). Just below the surface of Hollywood Starlet, the only thing below the surface, is the idea that a glossy kind of victimology?one that tweens and twentysomethings might want a vicarious jolt of?is ascendant. Morgan has been abused by the entertainment industry. Tune in!And how do you follow that? With a flick that seems to be titled Confessions of Go-Go Girl (Aug. 16 at 9 p.m. ET). Are these confessions, in contrast to the starlet's, not true? Absolutely, given their utter implausibility. The setting is Chicago?that urban atrium in the heartland?where lives Jane McCoy. Oh, the prim plainness of that Jane! She's graduated from college to find herself bored with the upper-bourgeois life determined for her by her prissy parents and ratified by her preppy boyfriend. She chucks law school on the eve of matriculation because she needs to express herself and so enrolls in acting school, supporting herself with a job at a department store. But spritzing perfume does not pay the bills. Lugging her pragmatic backpack around campus one day, Jane meets a wanton-eyed minx with a 10-gallon handbag. This is Angela, who is hustling the head-shot skills of her no-good photographer boyfriend and who ultimately explains that Jane can earn great gobs of dough by working the stage at a "go-go club." She doesn't even have to take off her underthings at this establishment! Doing so is forbidden, moreover![more ...]
• Did an Israeli newspaper break the law by publishing Obama's prayer note? A prayer note that Barack Obama left in Jerusalem's Western Wall was removed last Thursday and published in an Israeli newspaper. Traditionally, visitors fold these notes and leave them wedged between the stones in the wall, where the prayers remain until their official collection and burial. But Obama's note was taken by a student at a Jewish seminary (after several others had searched for it) and passed along to reporters. The newspaper that published the note, Maariv, came under sharp criticism for exposing a private prayer?but did it break the law?[more ...]
• Dash's amazing new GPS gizmo guides you around traffic. Dash's amazing new GPS gizmo guides you around traffic.[more ...]
• John Dickerson discusses McCain's Bush problem. Slate political correspondent John Dickerson was online on Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about John McCain's campaign and how the candidate should handle President Bush at the Republican convention. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.[more ...]
• Who needs the tech IPO? For weeks, Silicon Valley's tech entrepreneurs slavered over the rumors that Google was in the final negotiations to buy Digg, the social networking and news aggregation site, for a remarkable $200 million. The deal would give them a desperately needed morale boost; if Digg's founders could slap together a Web site with $11 million in venture capital and a few strings of open-source software, and then sell it for almost 20 times what they put into it, maybe there was hope for all the startups. So when Google suddenly backed out on July 25, you could hear the groans up and down Sand Hill Road. The money train, it seemed, was still derailed.[more ...]
• Slate's Culture Gabfest for July 31. Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 13 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.[more ...]
• Leave Barack Alone! A daily video from Slate V.[more ...]
• Banning fast food in poor neighborhoods. The war on fat has just crossed an ominous line. The Los Angeles city council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.[more ...]
• Advice on manners and morals (July 31, 2008). 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 ...]
• Bush will unveil new intelligence powers; McCain is trying to shape Obama's image. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with word that the White House will announce today that it has carried out "the largest overhaul of intelligence powers in a generation." President Bush signed an executive order updating spy powers yesterday that boosts the power of the director of national intelligence. The Los Angeles Times leads a look at how John McCain's campaign is focusing its energies on trying to shape how the public views Barack Obama. Funnily enough, that's exactly what Obama's campaign is trying to do as well. While McCain has turned increasingly negative?"even derisive," says the LAT?in trying to portray Obama as inexperienced and out of touch, the presumptive Democratic nominee is attempting to convince voters that he can be trusted as commander in chief.[more ...]
• Wall Street Is Hiring! That is the surprising conclusion of a CNNMoney story: while some 7600 jobs have been slashed on the Street in the past year, there is active recruitment going on, especially "at buy-side institutions like hedge funds looking to pick up talent on the cheap," notes writer David Ellis. The Financial Times agrees; it reports that Morgan Stanley chief John Mack is telling associates that the financial sector's recent tumult "is a historic opportunity to recruit bankers, traders and risk managers."[more ...]
• Dissent in the MSM on Edwards. Dissent in the MSM: Rebellious nibbling from mid-rank players who are harder to coopt than the New York and Washington elites:[more ...]

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