January 2011
92 posts
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How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis →
Julius Fromm saw a market he could tap into and founded his company in 1914, opening a small workshop in the Bötzow area in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. With World War I and the liberalisation of sexual values in the Weimar Republic, the demand for condoms exploded and Fromm’s business quickly expanded, and he established factories near the Spree River in Berlin-Mitte.
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Green Building →
At the heart of the landscape urbanist agenda is the notion that the most important part of city planning is not the arrangement of buildings, but the natural landscape upon which those buildings stand. Proponents envision weaving nature and city together into a new hybrid that functions like a living ecosystem. And instead of pushing people closer together in service of achieving density, as...
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The Great Afghan Bank Heist →
Poring over stacks of documents, investigators at the American Embassy in Kabul have pinpointed dozens of instances in which Kabul Bank executives may have bribed Afghan officials, including a successful bid to hold the contract to process the salaries that the government pays its employees each month—approximately seventy-five million dollars. Access to the salaries would give bank officials...
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The Final Countdown →
Within two months of the last touchdown, almost all of Florida’s 9,000 space workers will have lost their jobs. The layoffs have already begun. By the end of last year over 2,000 had been made redundant. Another cull began in January, with between 1,000 to 3,000 jobs at risk. A similar number of jobs will go in another round of cuts planned for the spring. […] In all, 19 per cent of jobs...
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Why Egypt’s popular rebellion is the greatest... →
I’m writing this on January 28th, 2011, at 11:53 AM Cairo time, although I’m an ocean away from Cairo. But, as someone wrote the other day on Twitter, yesterday, we were all Tunisian; today, we are all Egyptian, and tomorrow, we will all be free. So today I am writing this on Cairo time.
(Thanks, Inky)
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What's Happening in Egypt Explained →
This was originally posted at 1:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday. It is being updated and is being kept near the top of the blog. Some of the information near the top of the post may be outdated, and if you’ve been following the story closely, the information at the top will definitely seem very basic. So please scroll to the bottom of the post for the latest.
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The Hot Spotters →
For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty-minute visit to the doctor’s office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there’s nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and a pneumonia; the...
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The shocking truth about the electric Volt →
So this won’t be a conventional automotive review. First, I’m not qualified to write a conventional automotive review, inasmuch as I know next to nothing about automobiles. Second, I am nakedly biased. I very much wanted to hate this car. It challenges my worldview. Life is bewildering — essentially, it’s a fatal disease of uncertain course and unknown duration. If we...
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The art of good writing →
Fish’s aim is to offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students “nothing about how to write”. Instead, we should be examining the “logical relationships” within different sentence forms to see how they...
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The Lockerbie Deal →
In 2009 the convicted Lockerbie bomber was sent home to Libya from a Scottish prison on grounds of “compassionate release”—he had only three months to live, authorities said. A year and a half later the man is still alive—and a Vanity Fair investigation reveals new details about the business interests and private dealings that lay behind the prisoner’s release. At the heart of the matter: the...
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Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss →
No one doubts Lévi-Strauss was the author of important works and the purveyor of powerful insights, but the suspicion remains that behind his fantastically rigorous analyses of Amerindian culture there operated a deeply impressionistic and idiosyncratic mind at odds with any general theory. Some accused him of reducing the meaning of human existence to an arbitrary stock of contrasting flavors:...
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The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman →
Woodman was largely unknown during her lifetime. Her work was first introduced to the public at a Wellesley College exhibition that opened in 1986, five years after her suicide. At the time, much significance was attached to its apparently autobiographical qualities, which continue to intrigue audiences today. Her death does not simply cast a shadow on the images, but suffuses them with a...
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‘The stock market is for suckers’ →
No wonder American companies like Facebook are avoiding the hoi polloi of traditional stock markets in favour of raising capital from private, rich investors. “The idea of the stock market was to help businesses raise capital, and to provide people, individuals, with a chance to invest their savings and participate in that growth and have enough money to retire,” says Peter Cohan, president of...
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Revolt of the Elites →
Has any concept more completely defined and disfigured public life over the last generation than so-called elitism? Ever since Richard Nixon’s speechwriters pitted a silent majority (later sometimes “the real America”) against the nattering nabobs of negativism (later “tenured radicals,” the “cultural elite,” and so on), American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be...
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The Tale of the Cables →
The WikiLeaks cables, in other words, read more compellingly as a kind of literature. True, they don’t exactly evoke Tolstoy, Graham Greene, or even John le Carré. But diplomats are trained to chronicle the same tics and quirks of character that masters of fiction carefully record—and often with the same aim, of penetrating the surface equanimity of the characters they depict in order to...
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Opium Wars →
The grim axiom defining today’s Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan...
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The Worst Case →
The legal debate surrounding repeal is complicated and multi-dimensional. But part of it revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its relevance to...
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The Dancer and the Terrorist →
I’ve returned to Lima to interview another beautiful woman: the imprisoned dancer Maritza Garrido Lecca, in whose ballet studio Guzmán was arrested on the evening of September 12th 1992, as a result of which Maritza received a life sentence. In 1995, I published a novel about that night, “The Dancer Upstairs”, which was made into a film by John Malkovich in 2001. And while I spoke to everyone I...
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The Forger's Story →
For nearly three decades, Landis has visited museums across the US in various guises and tried to donate paintings he has forged. As well as Father Scott, he has posed as “Steven Gardiner” among other aliases. He never asks for money, although museums have often hosted meals for him and made small gifts. His only stipulation is that he is donating in his parents’ names – often his actual...
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The Final Days of Favre →
There may have been a point where Brett Favre played football because he loved it. But he kept playing it long after it made sense, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He never bothered to create another identity. The fact that others conspired to bestow this shallowness with meaning and virtue isn’t Brett Favre’s fault. I use my one question here to ask him about “life after...
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The Tragedy of Nepal 2011 →
Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well. The pollution is the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound and water,...
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The Tragedy of Nepal 2011 →
Nepal, as a travel destination, is nothing short of raved about. “The Himalayan Mountains are majestic and the people are the nicest in the world!” was a common travel tidbit I heard. What I found was a developing nation with deep problems becoming worse by the month with tourism hastening the poisoning of the well. The pollution is the worst I have ever seen. Air, land, sound and water,...
2 tags
How Billionaires Rule Our Schools →
The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national...
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Science Proves You're Stupid →
You can’t understand your brain unless you break it. Without brain damage, you are incapable of acquiring any insight into how your mind works, because your brain is sublimely designed to trick you into thinking you have a clue.
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Cultural Exchange →
Kos-Read, 37, is a self-described “token white guy.” In this booming land where ambitious aliens scramble for fortune, he has used a telegenic face and unusually dexterous Mandarin skills to carve out a niche in Chinese television and films: the foreigner, in all his various incarnations. His self-started acting career spans more than a decade, spinning across some of the headiest...
2 tags
How Billionaires Rule Our Schools →
The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national...
2 tags
The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots →
With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?
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The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots →
With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?
2 tags
Science Proves You're Stupid →
You can’t understand your brain unless you break it. Without brain damage, you are incapable of acquiring any insight into how your mind works, because your brain is sublimely designed to trick you into thinking you have a clue.
4 tags
Bed 18 →
I had flown to Afghanistan to write about women who attempt suicide by setting themselves on fire. Despite the 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime, women still have few opportunities for education and a career. They rarely have input in choosing a husband and little if any say in the mundane decision making of everyday life. The husband and his family dominate. Men rule, women obey. And for some...
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The Hazards of Duke →
Something ugly is going on at the university—a mercenary intensity that has been gathering strength for the past two decades, as the institution made the calculated decision to wrench itself into elite status by dint of its fortune in tobacco money and its sheer ambition. It lured academic luminaries—many of them longer on star power than on intellectual substance—built a fearsome sports...
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Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks →
So far, the WikiLeaks story has been represented as a struggle between WikiLeaks and the US empire: is the publishing of confidential US state documents an act in support of the freedom of information, of the people’s right to know, or is it a terrorist act that poses a threat to stable international relations? But what if this isn’t the real issue? What if the crucial ideological and political...
3 tags
Bed 18 →
I had flown to Afghanistan to write about women who attempt suicide by setting themselves on fire. Despite the 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime, women still have few opportunities for education and a career. They rarely have input in choosing a husband and little if any say in the mundane decision making of everyday life. The husband and his family dominate. Men rule, women obey. And for some...
3 tags
Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks →
So far, the WikiLeaks story has been represented as a struggle between WikiLeaks and the US empire: is the publishing of confidential US state documents an act in support of the freedom of information, of the people’s right to know, or is it a terrorist act that poses a threat to stable international relations? But what if this isn’t the real issue? What if the crucial ideological and political...
2 tags
The Hazards of Duke →
Something ugly is going on at the university—a mercenary intensity that has been gathering strength for the past two decades, as the institution made the calculated decision to wrench itself into elite status by dint of its fortune in tobacco money and its sheer ambition. It lured academic luminaries—many of them longer on star power than on intellectual substance—built a fearsome sports...
2 tags
How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big... →
Lockheed Martin doesn’t actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental...
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The battle over the Constitution →
Ours is one of the oldest written constitutions in the world and the first, anywhere, to be submitted to the people for their approval. As Madison explained, the Constitution is “of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed … THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.”
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Irony Is Good! →
It was really the Internet that salvaged Chinese humor, and especially irony of the embittered sort that Wang Shuo had pioneered. In the late 1990s, the Internet was still entirely uncensored (it would remain that way as late as 2004 or 2005), and it became, at last, a public space for writers and thinkers, who had been stifled by the government-controlled mainstream media, to explore new kinds...
3 tags
The battle over the Constitution →
Ours is one of the oldest written constitutions in the world and the first, anywhere, to be submitted to the people for their approval. As Madison explained, the Constitution is “of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed … THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES.”
2 tags
How a Giant Weapons Maker Became the New Big... →
Lockheed Martin doesn’t actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well. After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history. It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental...
2 tags
Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire →
Words matter, as candidate Barack Obama said in the 2008 election campaign. What to make, then, of President Obama’s pep talk last month to US troops in Afghanistan in which he lauded them as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known”? Certainly, he knew that those words would resonate with the troops as well as with the folks back home.
2 tags
Irony Is Good! →
It was really the Internet that salvaged Chinese humor, and especially irony of the embittered sort that Wang Shuo had pioneered. In the late 1990s, the Internet was still entirely uncensored (it would remain that way as late as 2004 or 2005), and it became, at last, a public space for writers and thinkers, who had been stifled by the government-controlled mainstream media, to explore new kinds...
2 tags
On the Mexican Suitcase →
In the spring of 1942, Gen. Francisco Aguilar González, the Mexican ambassador to the Vichy government, left France to return to Mexico with his wife, Maria. […] Tucked away in one of the trunks and kept hidden for nearly seventy years were three small cardboard boxes given to Aguilar for safekeeping. They contained an archive of 4,500 negatives of photographs of the Spanish Civil War...
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On Overconfidence →
Confidence is so vital even for the mundane activities of everyday life that we take it for granted. But it also looms large whenever we try to explain achievements that are out of the ordinary. Confidence is widely held to be an almost magic ingredient of success in sports, entertainment, business, the stock market, combat and many other domains—would Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali, and General...
2 tags
On the Mexican Suitcase →
In the spring of 1942, Gen. Francisco Aguilar González, the Mexican ambassador to the Vichy government, left France to return to Mexico with his wife, Maria. […] Tucked away in one of the trunks and kept hidden for nearly seventy years were three small cardboard boxes given to Aguilar for safekeeping. They contained an archive of 4,500 negatives of photographs of the Spanish Civil War...
3 tags
On Overconfidence →
Confidence is so vital even for the mundane activities of everyday life that we take it for granted. But it also looms large whenever we try to explain achievements that are out of the ordinary. Confidence is widely held to be an almost magic ingredient of success in sports, entertainment, business, the stock market, combat and many other domains—would Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali, and General...
2 tags
Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire →
Words matter, as candidate Barack Obama said in the 2008 election campaign. What to make, then, of President Obama’s pep talk last month to US troops in Afghanistan in which he lauded them as “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known”? Certainly, he knew that those words would resonate with the troops as well as with the folks back home.
2 tags
Solitary Confinement →
After being diagnosed with ALS in 2008, Tony Judt undertook two major projects. The first was his last public lecture, at NYU, in which he made the case for community, social democracy, and elevated public discourse. He converted it to the brief, polemical book Ill Fares the Land. The second and more remarkable project was Judt’s final book, a memoir entitled The Memory Chalet, which collects...
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My life as a stammerer →
The Observer’s film critic reflects on The King’s Speech – and how his own speech impediment has contributed to his life and character
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My life as a stammerer →
The Observer’s film critic reflects on The King’s Speech – and how his own speech impediment has contributed to his life and character