Occupied Paris.
Vichy France, quite the time and place: German officers, always in impeccable civilian clothes, were loyal clients of the brothel, as were agents of the Gestapo...
Category: people
“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by…”
Bin Laden expected to die. His last will and testament, written on December 14, reflected his fatalism. “Allah commended to us that when death approaches ...
Two slices of Dubai, modern on the outside…
An almost technical, brief, eye-opening account of how Sharia law affects financial deals in Dubai in the Financial Times. From a slow-burning diatribe in the I...
Why thinking hurts, among other things.
David Rock’s lecture (video) Your Brain at Work is wonderful. No one, not one of us, really wants to think and being asked to do so is experienced as a th...
Tilting the scales, again.
This shark story from Australia (an estimated 20 ft long predator takes two big bites out of a 10 ft great white) is sad, to me. The prey was caught by a human ...
Blind spots.
The AP quotes one of the pilots of the NWA flight that overshot its destination by 150 miles: “We were not asleep; we were not having an argument; we were...
Fame as a mania.
Does reality TV leave viewers confused as to what is reality and what is fantasy? The BBC: Parents are being asked for up to £40,000 ($80,000) to fund the cours...
Craigslist.
About 14 years ago, I wrote a friend back east the kind of letter only a 22 year-old can write. In it, I asked why it had to be that there were no national maga...
The witness project, all the time, everywhere, on automatic.
In the shadows of horrible crimes, a glimmer of hope, provided by cell phones: But even more than the shootings, the attacks on women — horrific anywhere, but v...
“First Asian-American to build a high-rise hotel in Manhattan,” etc.
Bootstraps and the real economy: Sam Chang’s Budget Hotel Empire in New York City in the NYT is a great, brisk read.
The decade ahead.
Admittedly not the best story to read while having trouble sleeping: Finance will be costlier and investment weak, so the stock of physical capital, on which pr...
Hilton Als, breaking it down.
I seldom laugh out loud while reading The New Yorker but this closing sentence is sharp: Instead of working to make us ask ourselves [“Whom haven’t ...
WTF is happening in Guinea?
Passport: Over 100 people were killed after soldiers began firing on a pro-democracy rally in Guinea yesterday. The demonstrators were protesting over rumors th...
A social animal, indeed.
The Economist: Ms Wokhwale prospered because being able to make and receive phone calls is so important to people that even the very poor are prepared to pay fo...
At the UN, stating the obvious.
My one genuine LOL moment of the day: “Berlusconi referred several times to President Obama’s speech today. However, he avoided reference to Qaddafi...
The psychology of poverty, or, things I’d rather read about than experience.
“Poverty makes some people insane,” writes Michael Gold, as quoted in an inspiring review of Depression Era art in a recent issue of The New Yorker....
The privileges of being a political refugee and the son of political dissidents.
The privileges of being a political refugee for me are many. Not least of which is my U.S. citizenship. But the one that I have in mind tonight is more immateri...
What will America look like in 30 years? Perhaps, like Canada in three.
Once it gets going, Adam Gopnik’s profile of Canadian Michael Ignatieff’s political philosophy is captivating. Anyone wondering, as I am, what Ameri...
Pie-chart: the racial composition of my friends pool on Facebook.
There are many caveats to the following graph, which is about as scientific a description of my person as my astrological sign. (Cancer.) First, I am a very bad...
Does the ethnic make-up of your friends pool on Facebook reflect your income?
I was looking at the profile of a friend’s friend on Facebook the other day. All of this person’s friends were Latinos – or, at least, had Hispanic ...