Al Crockett Web station

Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) became furious at his GOP colleagues during a debate over a 9/11 victims compensation bill. The bill would have provided up to $7.4 billion in aid to people sickened by World Trade Center dust. (July 30)

It's the first rule of politics: Don't take dirty money.

[more ...]



Sam Wyly - Republican - Politics - United States - George W. Bush

Anyone who watched Elena Kagan's performance before the Senate judiciary committee last month saw that under the bright lights of public scrutiny, she is quick-witted, conversational, and rarely cowed. She's funny and charming, but she's not real big on deference. And so one question that lingers, as the former solicitor general prepares to join the highest court in the land: Will those qualities help or hurt Elena Kagan in the darkened marble halls of the Supreme Court?

[more ...]



Elena Kagan - Supreme Court of the United States - United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary - United States - Senate

The GDP report for the second quarter has prompted much concern about the tepid 2.4 percent growth rate, but there are three other aspects of the report worth noting.

[more ...]



Gross domestic product - Recreation - Picture Ratings - Business and Economy - Economic growth

Ethics panel recommends lesser sanction against Rangel; video shows French police dragging woman with infant on street; sanctions against Iran actually working?; Paul the octopus inks book deal.

[more ...]

The news that Terrell Owens missed his flight to Cincinnati and, as a consequence, his first practice as a Bengal, wasn't exactly shocking for those who've followed the wide receiver's career. Might this be a sign that the Bengals' decision to pair the volatile Owens with the NFL's other receiver-turned-reality-star, the graceful-if-lovelorn Chad Ochocinco, will end in disaster? "I don't care how peaceful Owens is now," Sports Illustrated's Peter King wrote earlier this week. "If he's catching two or three balls a week, he's not going to be happy." On his Twitter feed, Fox Sports' Jason Whitlock mused that the Bengals' next move would be to sign JaMarcus Russell and O.J. Simpson.

[more ...]



Cincinnati Bengals - Terrell Owens - Chad Ochocinco - NFL - National Football League

This year has not been a good one for rock singer and Poison frontman Bret Michaels. A lifelong diabetic, Michaels was admitted to the hospital in April for appendicitis. One week after being discharged, he returned with a massive headache caused by a brain hemorrhage. Again, not long after going home, he returned to the hospital with numbness on the left side of his body. He was diagnosed with a mini-stroke—perhaps from a blood clot that traveled from his leg, through a small hole in his heart, and up to his brain. It may seem improbable that someone could be in the hospital three times within 45 days for separate, serious health problems. But it isn't: Hospital bouncebacks are remarkably common.

[more ...]



Bret Michaels - Hospital - Bleeding - Health - Medicine

It shouldn't be so surprising that spies and paranoia are back in popular culture or that they've made a rousing comeback in the news.

[more ...]



Paranoia - Music - Arts - Roleplaying - Games

I write to you at one of the three peak seasons for girl-watching in North America. Sweater-sheathed Ms. October will knock 'em out in the fall, and the darling buds of May will spring fresh in their sundresses all too shortly, but meanwhile this is sultry deep August—impossibly flimsy fabrics, exquisite lengths of limb. Addled by murderous heat, provoked by brutal hot-to-trotness, I here risk gathering some modest notes on visual experience and modern manners.

[more ...]




Recreation - Scouting - Travel - Conferences - Computer Science

When Jose Canseco finally came clean as the "Godfather of Steroids" in 2005, his use of performance-enhancing drugs had already been a matter of speculation for nearly two decades. In his tell-all biography, Juiced, Canseco alleged that he schooled many of his power-hitting teammates on integrating steroids and growth hormones into their training regimens, including such baseball greats as Mark McGwire and Jason Giambi. Yet given his earlier denials of steroid use, his credibility was tenuous.

[more ...]



Jose Canseco - Mark McGwire - Baseball - Anabolic steroid - sport

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 ...]



Facebook - Social Networking - Online Communities - RSS - Political Gabfest

In Greenberg, Ben Stiller plays Greenberg, a drifting musician-turned-carpenter who's getting over a nervous breakdown. He's a needy and casually abusive schmuck, a socially awkward and obsessive crank. And if you need any more clues to the extent of his pathological loserdom, here's one: He doesn't drive.

[more ...]



Ben Stiller - Greenberg - Arts - Movies - Hollywood Los Angeles California

Last week's news that Amazon is now selling more e-books than hardcovers surely delighted gadget lovers (while saddening booksellers). But as tech news, this was hardly news. Like portable MP3 players and laptops, the Kindle is yet another step away from from old media like vinyl and paper. This matters to collectors and nostalgic types (of which I am one), but the really important issues raised by the new technology, the ones all of us face, are social and romantic. Simply put, our gadgets give us too much privacy.

[more ...]




E-book - Book - Amazon Kindle - Technology - Amazon

It's official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost $41,000—that's a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a $7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to $33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price. Some will pay a premium for the frisson of going green or being the first "early adopter" on the block. Still, this little runabout is a rich man's ride.

[more ...]



General Motors - Chevrolet Volt - Electric car - Tax credit - Electricity

Certain elements (gold, silver) haven't gone out of fashion in millennia and probably never will. Others seem unlikely ever to win popularity with the public (hello, praseodymium). Still other elements languished for decades as dirt before zooming to prominence recently (silicon), while some debuted brilliantly but have slowly dwindled in esteem ever since (radium). But no element on the periodic table has had quite as strange a ride as aluminum.

[more ...]



Periodic table - Chemistry - Radium - Gold - Silicon

"Oh, my sweet monkey, I'm so, so sorry," James said. "You are a million leagues cooler than that loserati. I swear you'll bounce back."

[more ...]



DoubleX - Arts - Vampires - Fiction - Shopping

Slate 's mistakes.

[more ...]




Law - Business and Economy - HpSlate - Slate - Construction and Maintenance

Rep. Charlie Rangel had to decide on Thursday which he cares about more: his party or his job.

[more ...]



Ethics - Charles B. Rangel - Charlie Rangel - Philosophy - United States

In a few weeks, President Obama will start his summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard. (Before arriving, he'll spend a weekend enjoying Florida's oil-free beaches.) What should he take for beach reading? This is a conundrum for any bookish person, but particularly for the president, whose every move is assessed for meaning. What do Obama's picks say about the state of race in America? How will the independent voter react? Will he use a Kindle or an iPad?

[more ...]



Barack Obama - United States - Florida - Martha's Vineyard - Obama

Could it be that spotting bogus trends in the press is easier in the dog days of summer, when top editors go on vacation and journalistic standards of what constitutes a story begin to drop? That's my unproven hypothesis. Whatever the pattern, my readers discovered three totally bogus trend stories this week that I'd like to share.

[more ...]



Journalism ethics and standards - Arts - Short Stories - United States - National Urban League

Fox News, the Christian Science Monitor, and Yahoo, among other news outlets, carried a story Wednesday on a movement to promote "safe departure" for illegal immigrants. The concept, put forward by Americans for Legal Immigration, is to establish special border checkpoints for illegal immigrants who are voluntarily leaving Arizona, so they can do so "freely" and "without fear of being detained." Do illegal immigrants really run the risk of being detained when they leave the United States?

[more ...]




United States - Immigration - Arizona - Illegal immigration - Christian Science Monitor

Slate's DoubleX Gabfest on 12th & Delaware, Chelsea Clinton's wedding, and only children.

[more ...]



Slate - Double X - United States - History - RSS

Jeremy Prince would like to forgive the teenagers who are facing criminal charges for bullying his daughter before her suicide last January.

[more ...]



Suicide - South Hadley High School - Bullying - Death - Phoebe Prince

Surely you must have met Snooki. No? You're not familiar with her work? You've not yet snooked? Goodness gracious. This tiny young woman, a great idiot savant of reality-TV culture, is the prima donna of Jersey Shore (MTV, Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET). Adjusting a durable MTV formula—young people, picked to live in a house, find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting belligerently drunk—the program instantly earned a special place in the trash canon upon its debut last December.

[more ...]



Jersey Shore - MTV - Reality television - Television - New Jersey

Amid all the septic-tank gags, Meet the Parents had one standout scene—at De Niro's dinner table, where a nervous Ben Stiller delivers an excruciating soliloquy about cat-milking. It's one of the age-old tenets of farce—goofy stuff, said at the dinner table, sounds twice as goofy—but director Jay Roach was obviously so enamored of his discovery that he has sought to turn it into an entire movie. In Dinner for Schmucks (Paramount), a group of L.A. financiers meet regularly for dinner, each bringing along an idiot for everyone's amusement. The one with the best idiot wins.  The idea is lifted from the 1998 French film, Le Diner des Cons, directed by Francis Veber, in which a snobbish publisher befriended a fool for the purposes of civilized mockery, only to see the fool visit chaos upon every corner of his life. It wasn't Feydeau, but it delivered a neat kick to the shins of Parisian literary snobs—boo hiss. I'm not sure what you get from shifting the whole thing to the world of Los Angeles private equity, not a field that is world famous for its air of intellectual brinkmanship; or from giving the lead role to Paul Rudd, who happens to be one of the most affable, easy-going invertebrates on the planet.  "That's messed up," he protests when he first hears about the scheme—and just in case we miss his principles the first time, here they are again: "That's messed up" says his girlfriend Julie, who is played by French-born actress Stephanie Szostack, presumably on the principle that if you are to ransack a country's most venerable farceur traditions you may as well grab their most winsome, button-nosed actresses while you're at it.  Once a new job is waved in front of him as bait, Rudd succumbs, thus turning the film from a story of comic deliverance visited on a snob who richly deserves it into a story of comic deliverance visited upon someone who isn't a snob but pretends to be one, although really—truthfully?—he should know better. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Hollywood's insistence that everyone on-screen be the proud recipient of a gleaming character arc, leading them from the error of their ways into a well-lit, carefully irrigated world of moral beneficence, but even I could tell you that if you start introducing characters who should know better into the equation, all the fun goes out of the thing. Driving down the street one day, Tim run his Porsche into a sad sack in a windbreaker called Barry Speck (Steve Carell) who dusts himself off—Carell actually brushes his palms, as if getting up from push-ups—and takes the occasion to show off his collection of stuffed mice dioramas. Tim has his idiot.  Or does he? Steve Carell's movie career has been so fitful of late that his fans have been forced into retrospection, revisiting the delights of The 40-Year-Old Virgin as the film that both minted and perfected the Carell persona—a fortysomething late-starter with a streak of old-fashioned gallantry behind his collection of comic-book figurines. Carell, alone among the current crop of comedians, doesn't play stupid—he's way too quick, a venal schemer in The Office, whose fine features twitch with intelligence—so I would be fascinated to learn what thinking lay behind casting him as a stone-cold dumbkopf. Carell dons some rabbity false teeth and a pudding-bowl wig, the same worn by Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, but Carell has not, thus far, modeled his career on the plasticine antics of Carrey, so why start now? "He's a tornado of destruction," says Rudd and you think: "No, he's not." Carell is and always will be the guy standing in the path of the tornado, his hand raised and a stapler attached to his tie.  Actually, Barry is less a character and more a series of labored comic set pieces crammed into human form. Let's see. Barry turns up to the dinner a day early, taps into a line of e-communication with Rudd's stalker-ex, and invites her round for a spot of spanking, just in time for Julie to witness the whole thing and walk out in a huff. Funny, no? OK, try this. Rudd has to impress a Swiss banker at lunch, so Barry turns up pretending to be his brother, and the stalker-ex pretending to be Julie, so that he can propose marriage to her just as the real Julie enters stage left and walks off in an even bigger huff. Isn't that just a hoot? What's Rudd doing hanging out with the guy if he's such trouble? Ah well, you see, he forgot his bus pass so he can't get home. Why doesn't he catch a taxi? He forgot his house keys, too... You get the picture. Roach may be the least organic director of comedy currently working in Hollywood. Other directors strive for svelte invisibility, teeing up their setups so imperceptibly that all the actors have to do is roll up and take a clean spike at the ball. Roach is down in the sand pit, furiously digging his way out, passing off the sweaty contrivance of his set pieces as comic zaniness. It's more like a form of comic epilepsy:; He whips up the performances to almost unendurable levels of frenzy and then discards them for someone new, like a bored child riffling through toys.  In addition to Carell, we get Zach Galifianakis as a mind-reading IRS officer, Jemaine Clement as a goatish artist-satyr; and that's before we even get to the dinner itself, which features a blind fencer, a pet psychic, a guy who regurgitates food for his vulture ... This tawdry freak show is a telling substitution for the actual stupidity mocked in Veber's original. Roach's remake manages both mean-spiritedness and timidity the same time. That's some feat—moviemaking for boneheads.

[more ...]




Paul Rudd - Steve Carell - Los Angeles - 40 Year Old Virgin - Jim Carrey

Dinner for Schmucks, which opens this Friday, is uncharted territory for Paul Rudd. Fifteen years after his breakthrough role in Clueless, Rudd finally gets to headline (along with Steve Carell) a big-budget summer comedy. It's the next logical step up in Rudd's gradual ascension. In 2008, he reached Hollywood leading-man status, though in more modest studio movies: the quickly forgotten Over Her Dead Body, with Eva Longoria, and the so-so Role Models. In 2009 came I Love You, Man, another tired entry in the bromantic canon. With its midsummer slot and relentless publicity campaign, Dinner for Schmucks is poised to be his biggest opener yet. And later this year comes a call-up to prestige-picture territory, with a starring role in James L. Brooks' new film, Everything You've Got, due in the middle of Oscar season.

[more ...]



Paul Rudd - Steve Carell - Dinner for Schmucks - Over Her Dead Body - James L. Brooks

The Christian publisher Zondervan announced the release of Speaking Up, a biography of Sarah Palin for young readers, earlier this month. It had been planned for fall publication. But just a week after the initial announcement, the publisher removed Speaking Up from its schedule and scrubbed the book from its Web site.

[more ...]



Sarah Palin - Republican - Politics - United States - Parties

Last week, I wrote two articles about Shirley Sherrod, the woman who was wrongly depicted as a racist by Andrew Breitbart, denounced by the NAACP, and fired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You, the readers of Slate, responded with more than 450 comments. You added insights, raised questions, and in some cases hammered me. I owe you some answers. Let's take it from the top.

[more ...]



andrewbreitbart - Racism - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - United States - Slate

Could Ariel Sharon's most enduring legacy be Tel Aviv's massive landfill?

[more ...]




Tel Aviv - Ariel Sharon - Israel - Middle East - Travel and Tourism

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 ...]



Slate - Dear Prudence - Health - Shopping - Medicine

I didn't think it was possible, but Julian Assange has now done it: By releasing 92,000 documents full of Afghanistan intelligence onto the laptops of an unsuspecting public, the founder of Wikileaks has finally made an ironclad case for the mainstream media. If you were under the impression that we don't need news organizations, editors, or reporters with more than 10 minutes' experience anymore, then think again. The notion that the Internet can replace traditional news-gathering has just been revealed to be a myth.

[more ...]



Julian Assange - Wikileaks - Mass media - Afghanistan - Media

Neither Tom Perriello nor Gerry Connolly, both first-term Democrats from Virginia, wants to talk about Charlie Rangel. "I think the people who are most obsessed with that are you," said Connolly at a meeting with reporters hosted by the centrist Democratic group Third Way. "My constituents don't even know who Charlie [is]." Voters don't bring it up at town hall meeetings, said Perriello, who has 20 more such meetings scheduled for August. Rangel, the New York Democrat who stepped down from the powerful Ways and Means Committee in March, has been charged with violating House ethics rules and faces a possible September trial. Republicans hope to make his case into a broader attack on Democratic leadership. Scores of Democrats have returned money Rangel donated to their campaigns. A few have asked for Rangel to resign. Still, his two House colleagues insisted it was a ginned up controversy that likely wouldn't amount to much.

[more ...]



New York - Democratic - Virginia - Charles B. Rangel - Republican Party

America's first television stars emerged just after World War II. First among these were professional wrestlers, and greatest among them was Gorgeous George. A golden-tressed brutalizer, Gorgeous enjoyed mirrors and Chanel No. 5. He entered the ring to "Pomp and Circumstance," bathed in purple light, a valet, Jeffries, carrying "GG" monogrammed towels on a silver tray. He was vain, absurd—and essential. Because, after 16 years of Depression and destruction, he showed Americans how to adjust to the postwar world, its eerily unprecedented prosperity. How to become newer, "better" people. He eased the transition from wartime savagery to peacetime consumerism by joining both in a performance piece for which George Raymond Wagner, his creator, was by 1949 making $70,000 a year.

[more ...]




World War II - Jersey Shore - Great Depression - United States - George Wagner

UPDATE, July 28: On July 27, BP announced that Tony Hayward would be stepping down on Oct. 1. So when, exactly, did or will he "lose his job," which is how we asked the question? And how did Slate readers do in predicting his departure? The short answer: Not so good. The mean response was Aug. 29--off by more than a month no matter how you measure it--and the median was Aug. 16, only a few weeks after the announcement but  more than  six weeks before his scheduled departure. On the bright side, 47 of you said he would lose his job on July 27, while 58 predicted he would lose it on Oct. 1. Let's call you both half-right.

[more ...]



Tony Hayward - Oil spill - BP - Slate - Daniel Gross

I can't say I was surprised to hear Alberto Gonzales telling CNN's John King last week that he and his family are the victims of a smear campaign. When the Justice Department finally issued the results of a two-year probe into the U.S. attorney's firing scandal last week, finding there was no basis from which to bring criminal charges, the Wall Street Journal editorial page declared moral victory: "After their dismissal in 2006, Democrats pounced on the Bush administration for politicizing justice, and Mr. Gonzales became their favorite pinata. Democrats alleged that Karl Rove, then the deputy White House chief of staff, meddled in those decisions. He was also exonerated this week." His supporters now contend that Gonzales did nothing wrong and deserves an apology. Gonzales' lawyer agrees. And as Gonzales put it to John King last Friday, "I feel angry that I had to go through this, that my family had to suffer through this. And what for? It was for nothing."

[more ...]



Alberto Gonzales - Karl Rove - United States Department of Justice - Wall Street Journal - John King

General Motors has announced that the bottom-end version of the Chevy Volt, its new electric car, will cost $41,000. Even after a generous federal rebate, it's still pricey. In 2008, median household income in the United States was $50,303. And so it's bound to generate loads of skepticism. How can this electric vehicle, which has "a gas powered range-extending engine/generator," compete with gas-powered sedans that cost half as much? The Chevrolet Malibu starts at about $21,000. Why would anyone switch? How can we save the planet if U.S. companies are pitching these products only to the rich?

[more ...]



General Motors - Electric car - United States - Chevrolet Volt - Chevrolet

To call the torrent of information about the Afghanistan war released by WikiLeaks a mere leak is to insult the gods of hydrodynamics. This leak was a howling vortex of 92,000 individual reports, most of which were marked "secret."

[more ...]




Afghanistan - Wikileaks - Julian Assange - Asia - History

Nearly 60 percent of dogs in the United Kingdom are overweight or obese, according to a recent study from the University of Glasgow. Using slightly different standards, researchers in the United States have found excess poundage in more than 45 percent of dogs and 58 percent of cats. How do they know when a pet is overweight?

[more ...]



Glasgow University - Obesity - Dog - United States - Pets

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, doesn't know who leaked the thousands of Afghanistan war documents that his site posted this week. That's not unusual—it's how WikiLeaks works. To get a scoop to WikiLeaks, a would-be whistle-blower clicks the Submit Documents button on the site's home page, then uploads a file through a form that encrypts every interaction between the source and the site. WikiLeaks keeps no logs of the submission, and the site says that it is legally bound, under Sweden's press secrecy laws, never to cooperate with any investigation into the identity of the source. The site takes several additional measures to scrub submitted documents of any information that could compromise the leaker, removing any ID trails left by word processing software, for instance. The site also constantly feeds fake submissions through its network in order to fool potential attackers. "We have never lost a source," Assange declares in his pitch to whistle-blowers around the world. "None of our sources has been exposed or come to harm."

[more ...]



Julian Assange - Wikileaks - War in Afghanistan - Afghanistan - Whistleblower

Have I learned anything by being offline?

[more ...]



Arts - People - Quilting - Crafts - Crazy Quilts

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 97 with Jessica Grose, Stephen Metcalf, Lev Grossman, John Swansburg and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

[more ...]




Comic-Con - Comics - Arts - Angelina Jolie - Collecting

Combining elements of makeover fantasies, petal-strewn dating programs, Japanese game shows, magazine columns of the snag-a-man Cosmo sort, and primitive folklore, Plain Jane (the CW, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET) brushes the pleasure receptors with an odd texture of fluff. For its purposes, a plain Jane is a shy, awkward, style-allergic young woman bearing the weight of a long-standing crush on her drooping shoulders. (A montage nods to archetypal examples including Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed, and Taylor Swift in "You Belong With Me," singing to her frumped-up reflection in the bedroom mirror.) Each week, one such wallflower comes onto the show and into the glamorous clutches of hostess Louise Roe, and Plain Jane churns out an assembly-line fairy tale reflecting current trends in gender politics, flirting etiquette, and casual wear. The show takes reality TV one coquettishly shod step in a new direction in its quest to package romance and myth.

[more ...]



Drew Barrymore - Never Been Kissed - Taylor Swift - Reality television - Plain Jane

NAIVASHA, Kenya—Jack Kneppers, one of two Dutch brothers who run Kenya's Maridadi Flowers, leans in to me and whispers that even after the Icelandic ash fiasco, his farm still made a profit. He then winks and bursts into laughter. Kneppers' flower farm may have been the only beneficiary of the eruption of a volcano beneath Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull glacier this April. A travel embargo on flights bound for or leaving Europe left travelers stranded, European small businesses couldn't import more of their products, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal ended up spending more time than he expected with a Rolling Stone reporter. Kenya's dozens of flower farms also suffered. Kenya supplies more than a third of Europe's cut flowers—tropical blooms and traditional roses, carnations, tulips, and more—and it was vulnerable to the whims of a volcano located thousands of miles away.

[more ...]



Kenya - Iceland - Africa - Business - Eyjafjallajökull

I have a rule: No war movies. Or TV shows or HBO specials or even the nightly news, at least when coverage turns to the conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan. Avoiding the topic is essential to my mental health, especially during my husband's deployment to Baghdad this year. No one explains why better than writer and military spouse Jehanne Dubrow, who catalogues a list of celluloid offenders in the poem "Against War Movies," from her collection Stateside. She confesses what I'm not brave enough to admit:

[more ...]



Iraq - Iraq War - Military - War in Afghanistan - Baghdad

With all the hype about personalized medicine—one day, doctors will use patients' genomes to tailor treatments—one would hope that the medical community already had a decent grip on differences between the sexes. After all, says Teresa Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University, "You really can't get to personalized medicine until you at least split the population in half." Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet. Last month, Woodruff co-authored one of three related editorials in Nature illuminating the now decades-long sex bias in biomedicine, which leads doctors to preferentially study diseases and test drugs in males. It's a practice that not only puts women at risk, Woodruff argues, but also limits the scope of our scientific knowledge.

[more ...]




Medicine - Northwestern University - Health - Obstetrics and gynaecology - Professor

Dear My Goodness,I've always tried to find fun ways to volunteer in my community. I've served food in soup kitchens during the holidays and tutored kids after school for a while. But I always end up bored with the same repetitive charity work. I'd like to do something off the beaten path that serves those around me but is different and might teach me new skills—maybe something in the arts. What are some innovative ideas for getting out of this volunteer rut? —Denise in D.C.

[more ...]



Volunteer - Philanthropy - Opportunities - School - Community

When is a tax hike not a hike? When it's a tax un-cut!

[more ...]



Tax cut - United States - Taxation - Tax - Politics

Are we in a period of gloomy growth? An era in which Americans are pessimistic and sour but buying more anyway?

[more ...]



Consumer confidence - United States - Economics - Conference Board - Social Sciences

Pope Benedict XVI announced Sunday that he would pray for the 19 revelers trampled to death at a techno musical festival in Duisburg, Germany. Do Christians think praying can help a dead person get into heaven?

[more ...]




Germany - Duisburg - Music festival - Pope Benedict XVI - Love Parade

You can bet your Lucky Strike account that Don's past will be exposed (or at least threatened to be exposed) before Episode 6. Who is Don Draper, indeed. It's simply too tempting a plot point—the gun on the mantel. His past led last season to the exquisite scene in which Bert Cooper asks, "Would you say I know something about you, Don?" Perhaps the greatest checkmate in the show's history. One way to judge Season 4 is whether it can build to a similarly tense moment.

[more ...]



Don Draper - madmen - Lucky Strike - SCDP - Bert Cooper

Nearly 77,000 of the 92,000 military documents unveiled by WikiLeaks this week are individual incident reports from the war in Afghanistan. Each report tallies the number of soldiers, civilians, and enemy targets both wounded and killed. While no one was hurt in the majority of the incidents, these reports, read in aggregate, offer a sterile but hyper-detailed picture of the dead and wounded on all sides of the nearly decadelong war.

[more ...]



Wikileaks - War in Afghanistan - Afghanistan - Warfare and Conflict - Afghanistan Civil War

Kids in the Gaza Strip can spend their summers swimming, studying the Quran, or learning about Palestinian prisoners.

[more ...]



Gaza Strip - Hamas - United Nations - Summer camp - Camps

For those of us into music of the classical persuasion, gearing up to watch the new biopic Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky inevitably brings up thoughts of other movies about composers, which is to say, how lousy most of them are. For every Amadeus, a decent picture in its way, there are any number like Immortal Beloved, a Romance Channel travesty.

[more ...]




Igor Stravinsky - Coco Chanel - Arts - Amadeus - Music

The past news week was dominated by the Shirley Sherrod saga, a miserable episode that involved political operatives masquerading as journalists distorting fact in order to promote pre-existing bias, followed by a rush to judgment on the part of those too weak or fearful to exercise independent thought. A casualty of the Sherrod story's domination of the news is that it obscured the whimpering end of two of the largest crises of the past several years: the signing of the Dodd-Frank financial services reform bill and the plugging of the BP well.

[more ...]



Politics - Washington - Shirley Sherrod - Wall Street - United States

Does it make sense to remain a child's spiritual adviser when you barely speak to his parents?

[more ...]



Home - Family - Parenting - Health - Child Health

WikiLeaks has struck the White House, releasing more than 90,000 raw reports and other documents from inside the Afghan war effort, mostly from troops and intelligence officers. Several of the reports' themes are embarrassing: civilian casualties, Afghan corruption, Pakistani collusion with the Taliban. Now the White House is striking back. In a coordinated operation, National Security Adviser James Jones, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley have dismissed the leaked documents as old news that shouldn't alter U.S. policy. Are their rebuttals persuasive? Let's take a look.

[more ...]



White House - United States - Wikileaks - Pakistan - Robert Gibbs

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear T.R. Hummer read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..

[more ...]




Poetry - iTunes - Slate - Arts - Online Writing

If you're running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, you're not allowed to admit it. But just because you can't admit it doesn't mean you have to stop campaigning. So when Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota was asked this morning to describe what his party should offer in 2012, he didn't simply say "me." Instead he described a bright future that had a Tim Pawlenty-shaped hole in it.

[more ...]



Republican - Tim Pawlenty - Minnesota - United States - Politics

General Motors sold more cars in China than in the United States in the first half of 2010, and China now accounts for one-quarter of the company's global sales. That seems like a lot of capitalism for a country that calls itself communist. How communist is China, really?

[more ...]



China - United States - People's Republic of China - Capitalism - Asia

Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

[more ...]



Sport - Major League Baseball - Stefan Fatsis - Mike Pesca - Baseball

Almost two years ago, I reviewed Ubuntu, the user-friendly version of the free Linux operating system. I wasn't impressed. I found the software a pain to install, a pain to work with, and—even if it cost me nothing—far less worthy of my time than other major OSes. "Nothing about Ubuntu is an advantage over anything in either Mac or Windows—it has no more features, no better stability, no greater speed," I wrote.

[more ...]




Ubuntu - Linux - Operating system - Microsoft Windows - Distributions

Taking stock of True Blood at the midseason mark.

[more ...]



True Blood - Business - Health - Medicine - Medical Specialties

Just because some documents are classified doesn't mean that they're news or even necessarily interesting. A case in point is the cache of 92,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war that someone leaked to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Der Spiegel in Germany. All three published several of these documents—presumably the highlights—in today's editions.

[more ...]



New York Times - Wikileaks - Afghanistan - Der Spiegel - War in Afghanistan

The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice in The Hague—to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful—was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?

[more ...]



Serbia - Kosovo - International Court of Justice - United States - Hague

"I'm 41, and I'm single," Louis C.K. said in introducing himself on Louie (FX, Tuesdays at 11 p.m. ET). He was holding a mic onstage at the Comedy Cellar, where the color of the exposed brick colluded with the lighting so that he took on the purple sheen of an uncommon pigeon. He went on to offer a clarification: "Mmmm—not really single, just alone." He dragged out that last word with a strain indicating the precise weight of its meaning. Woeful but not self-pitying, his intonation was a generalized metaphysical moan, and it declared that his relationship status coincided with a particular state of being and nothingness. Having suffered the death of much of his optimism, Louis C.K. is feeling alone in the universe.

[more ...]




louis ck - Louie - FX - Comedy Cellar - Social Sciences

I'm with Emily on Luke's mom. I did not find her all that convincing. I think the show did better when it made the minor characters one dimensional. Smash's mom from the first season is a great example. She was exactly the tough-love single mom you expected to find in such a situation, and she always lived up to our expectations. This season, they have been trying too hard to humanize the parents and instead they've wound up making them uneven and confusing—Becky's mom wavers from vulnerable to vicious, Jess' dad from curmudgeon to saint, and Luke's parents from Christian robots to gentle darlings. One minute his mom was the loony from Carrie and the next minute she was staring dewy-eyed at her beloved son. I love that he calls her Ma'am, though. That's a great detail, along with the simplicity of his particular prayer: "Dear Lord. Please help me get some more drugs before Friday."The abortion plot is another way in which this show is stuck in the 1980s or maybe the early 1990s. Those were the days when Christian conservatives used the school board bureaucracies to push their agenda, and Texas was ground zero. The show went a little overboard on that loud-mouthed fundie—"Are you calling me a liar?" she yelled. But they got the basic dynamic right. Tami is speaking one language and they are speaking another. Repeating that she "followed protocol" is not helping her cause. In the minds of her enemies, the only conscionable Christian thing for Tami to have done was to not follow protocol (while pretending to) and send that girl to the nearest crisis pregnancy center, where some nice Christian lady posing as a regular nurse would have convinced Becky to keep that baby. What does "protocol" matter to them in the face of a grave sin? So to answer your question, Emily, I think Tami's even-handed counsel is precisely what got her in trouble.

[more ...]



Friday Night Lights - Texas - Luke - Abortion - Christian

A strange thing happened in late June, when the big Russian Internal Ministry bosses disclosed their earnings and those of their family members, thanks to President Dmitry Medvedev's new anti-corruption measures. The surprise didn't come from the men: The head-honcho cops were the fat cats everyone assumed them to be, declaring incomes that strangely exceeded that of the president. And the ranks of the obscure upper-middle management fittingly declared modest incomes, usually topping at out around $50,000. A Russian-made car here, a modest apartment there.

[more ...]



Russia - Moscow - Dmitry Medvedev - President of the United States - United States

I was drawn to Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer because of a book I am writing, provisionally titled Good White People. It will be a history of whites who have contributed conspicuously to anti-racist struggles on behalf of people of color. Just as the Israelis have created the category of "righteous gentiles" to honor those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, I want to create a category of "good white people," or GWP, to honor those who have risked ostracism, injury, or even death to join with people of color in resisting racial domination.

[more ...]



Freedom Summer - Holocaust - Mississippi - Racism - Jews

Shirley Sherrod, Tony Hayward, and the Great Liberal Conspiracy.

[more ...]




Barack Obama - President - United States - History - Government

For Democrats, the most frightening candidate of 2010 may well be Susana Martinez, the Republican nominee for governor in New Mexico. If she wins in November, she will be the first female Hispanic governor in U.S. history—and an instant national GOP spokeswoman.

[more ...]



New Mexico - United States - Republican - Democratic Party - Hispanic

Summer camp is a rite of passage for many American children, whether they enjoy the experience or hate it. Four years ago, Timothy Noah dissected camp culture and found that adults will never escape the patterns they exhibited as camp-bound children, no matter how many years removed. The article is reprinted below.

[more ...]



United States - Summer camp - Camp - Recreation - Child

If you follow the news closely enough, you might have caught a small item recently about Meg Ryan canceling a scheduled appearance at a film festival in Jerusalem to protest Israeli policy. This was significant not because anyone should care what the nose-crinkling movie star thinks about the Mideast but precisely because no one does. Ryan, a conventional Hollywood Democrat, is a barometer of celebrity politics. That sort of sheeplike, liberal opinion once reflexively favored Israel. Now it's dabbling in the repellant idea of shunning the entire country.

[more ...]



Israel - Meg Ryan - Jerusalem - Middle East - Film festival

In the action-spy thriller Salt, which opens Friday, Angelina Jolie stars as a disgraced CIA agent who must at one point rescue her kidnapped German husband from Russian spies. Meanwhile, in the pilot episode of the TV series Covert Affairs, a rookie CIA agent is told that she should not date foreign nationals. So which is it—can CIA agents have romantic relationships with people from other countries or not?

[more ...]




Angelina Jolie - Salt - Central Intelligence Agency - Covert Affairs - Russia

Thank you for considering Budget Inception. We realize that, in this modern world, you have countless idea-implantation options to choose from, and we are honored that you thought of us. Should you favor us with your business, we guarantee top-quality subconscious manipulation at the lowest possible rates.

[more ...]



Business - Modern history - Leonardo DiCaprio - Inception - United States

You know the line: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." It's Pacino, complaining about the mob in Godfather III (or maybe about the Hollywood culture that got him to do the much-derided second sequel). Here I'm talking about the world of Nabokov controversies. Some pretty rough characters in that mob, too. You don't want to get on the Don's bad side.

[more ...]



Pale Fire - Godfather Part III - Sequel - Hollywood - Godfather III

Salt (Columbia Pictures) is a movie that's almost impossible to review without blundering into the demilitarized zone between exposition and spoilers. Just about everything that happens from the fifth minute on out is a twist, with so many double-fakeouts and reversals that you finally realize there's only one principle you need to grasp to finish the ride: Angelina Jolie rules.

[more ...]



Angelina Jolie - Salt - Arts - Movies - Animation

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 ...]




Facebook - Social Networking - Online Communities - Politics - RSS

Slate's New York office is hiring interns for the fall semester, primarily to help with the magazine's culture section. Responsibilities include regularly updating Slate's internal calendar of upcoming cultural events as well as providing research and administrative assistance. For the right candidate, there may also be an opportunity for occasional writing. The position is available to current full-time students only.

[more ...]



Slate - New York - Academic term - Intern - Student

Andrew Breitbart made a mistake. Based on a two-minute video excerpt of Shirley Sherrod's speech at an NAACP dinner last year, he accused her of practicing racism as a federal employee. He neglected to mention that in the excerpt, she was clearly talking about events in a different job 20 years ago. And when the rest of the video turned up, it proved that her story was about transcending her old racial resentment.

[more ...]



Andrew Breitbart - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - Racism - Shirley Sherrod - United States

A July 22 "Technology" column by Farhad Manjoo originally and incorrectly referred to HTC as a Korean company. It is based in Taiwan.

[more ...]



Farhad Manjoo - Taiwan - Korean language - Asia - Travel and Tourism