Among the few embarrassing experiences left to a person in his fifties is to be exposed as a naif. Over the years I’ve grown quite complacent, in my aging bourgeois post-9/11 whiteness, to snuggle myself under the warm comforter of a visible police presence. It’s been dismaying and alarming and frightening to see what I …
Last year, Mike Bloomberg was my hero. The way he stood up to the opponents of the lower Manhattan Islamic cultural center was eloquent, and courageous, and in the greatest traditions of New York and America. But this year, Bloomie is blowing it. His annoyed, prickly, dismissive, contentious treatment of the Occupy Wall Street protesters …
The most discouraging story of the work is a report in The Economist of the progress scientists have made in using machines to read minds. According to a report in the Public Library of Science, scientists at the University of Minnesota have found that by taping electrodes to the scalp, a volunteer can pilot a …
I absolutely love this photo of Hilary Clinton, taken by Diana Walker for Time magazine. Clinton was on a C-17, on her way to meet with rebel leaders in Tripoli. Despite her stated refusals, I think it’s likely she will be Barack Obama‘s running mate in the 2012 election. She not only will help him …
What’s worse–the heavy-handed regimes like Russia, where the president rules like the former head of the KGB that he is, or the apparently democratic regimes where real power stands behind a curtain and whispers its dictates into the ears of the elected government? In an article in the Guardian, George Monbot reports on the Corporation …
Almost as though we were living a double feature of A Day at the Races and Horsefeathers (minus the Marx Brothers and the mayhem), we followed an afternoon at Keeneland with some exciting SEC pigskin action at Commonwealth Stadium, where were saw the visiting Mississippi State Bulldogs take on the Kentucky Wildcats. Both teams cam …
Molly and I went to Lexington this weekend to visit Cara, who seems to be doing brilliantly well at the midpoint of her first semester of her freshman year at the University of Kentucky. She’s working hard, fitting in, getting good grades, making friends and getting involved. I’m very happy for her, and pretty damned …
In his very good new book The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire, former Forbes editor Stewart Pinkerton describes the decline of the publication’s significance, and along the way champions the noble tradition of magazine journalism. “There’s an important distinction between one hundred people using …
Nothing in John Brown’s life more became him than the way he took leave of it. One of the strangest and most challenging figures in American history, a combination of practical fiasco and undiminished confidence, Brown was a failed tanner, a failed farmer, and in narrow terms, a failed insurrectionist. As much as anybody, he …