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| Angela Merkel's quiet revolution. November 2, 2009 at 11:05 pm |
| Did you know that there were German elections in late September? Were you aware that the German socialists were soundly defeated? Had you realized that there was now a new government in Germany? No? Then give the credit—for both the victory and the fact that you haven't heard about it—to Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor. And even if you did know all of that, you might as well cheer anyway, because Merkel's achievement is far greater than it seems. She is a soft-spoken, even-tempered, and frankly dull pragmatist who has compared her economic program to that of a "Swabian housewife." Her election campaigns are the most boring anyone can remember. Despite the decisiveness of her recent victory, she humbly declared that she "respected those who did not vote for me." To underline that point, she celebrated her new term as chancellor with a lunch of potato soup and sausages, an event that the Financial Times called "so low-key it resembled an atonement rite more than a celebration." She is, if you like, the anti-Obama: zero charisma, zero glamour, beige pantsuits, and a spouse who rarely appears in public.
[more ...]  Germany - Angela Merkel - Financial Times - Government - Political campaign |
| Mad Men: How Betty Draper broke my heart. November 2, 2009 at 9:12 pm |
| One of the most useful words you'll learn on Internet message boards is the verb to ship. Derived from relationship, it describes what fans of a television series are doing when they root for certain characters to become romantically involved. Most fans of Cheers shipped Sam and Diane; some fans of The West Wing shipped Josh and Donna. It's a useful term. Before it was invented, there was no simple way to express the strange feeling of wanting fictional people to fall in love.
[more ...]  West Wing - BettyDraper - MadMen - Television program - Television |
| Why big farms can treat their workers better than small farms. November 2, 2009 at 3:10 pm |
| I love food, but I've never been much into farms. I've ignored friends' repeated encouragements to travel the world picking organic vegetables or do a cow-milking internship. But this summer I sucked it up and headed for the fields—the big ones in California's Salinas and Central valleys, where half the country's fruits and vegetables are grown. I went there to start research for a book, for which I aimed to work my way through America's food system, from farm to table. At the outset, that meant spending 50-plus hours a week under the hot sun hoeing weeds, sorting peaches, and cutting garlic. I knew going in that I'd learn unexpected lessons, but of all the new thoughts crowding my head, none have surprised me as much as this: God bless big farms.
[more ...]  Vegetable - Fruit - Food - Business - California |
| Two biographies of Ayn Rand. November 2, 2009 at 10:01 am |
| Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
[more ...]  Ayn Rand - United State - Philosophy - Rush Limbaugh - Objectivism |
| Mad Men: Aqua Net is going to need a new campaign. November 2, 2009 at 2:19 am |
| So let's see here. I believe I owe one old-fashioned to Patrick, two to Julia, and four to Slate "War Stories" columnist Fred Kaplan, with whom I made an especially foolhardy side bet. Back in August, Fred interviewed Matthew Weiner, who assured him that Season 3 would "handle everything." Yet Weiner had been coy about the Kennedy assassination, suggesting to other interviewers that while he wouldn't ignore it, he might not dramatize the president's death in the same way he had Kennedy's election and the Cuban missile crisis. Silly me, I believed him. All indications—Margaret Sterling's inauspicious wedding date, the constant references to Dallas, the eerie Aqua Net campaign—were that this season was hurtling toward just such a treatment of Kennedy's death. And as Julia sagely predicted, it happened this week.
[more ...]  Sponsored Topics: Cuban Missile Crisis - MatthewWeiner - MadMen - Dallas - John F. Kennedy assassination | | | |
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