About a dozen F.B.I. agents, some with guns drawn, stormed Dr. Xi’s home in the Philadelphia suburbs in May, searching his house just after dawn, he said. His two daughters and his wife watched the agents take him away in handcuffs on fraud charges....
Temple University put him on administrative leave and took away his title as chairman of the physics department. He was given strict rules about who at the school he could talk to. He said that made it impossible for him to continue working on a long-running research project that was nearing completion.
Dr. Xi, who came to the United States in 1989 and is a naturalized citizen, was adamant that he was innocent. But it was only when he and his lawyers reviewed the government’s evidence that they understood what had happened. “When I read it, I knew that they were mixing things up,” Dr. Xi said....
There’s no insight here to raise this irony to the level of satire. There is only mockery, backed by certainty that the reader shares the author’s contempt. Sarcasm is a natural fit for partisan news aggregators, because it relies on a calculated appeal to shared attitudes.As I read Brooks's observations, I'm thinking that the problem is that people are now finding comfort in sarcasm. But sarcasm should feel bad. It should heighten your awareness of what's not right. Now, what can make you aware of what's wrong with low-quality sarcasm? You need to feel revulsion for the sarcasm, not short-cut into the contempt that the sarcasm nudges you to feel.
Kitsch banks heavily on these shared attitudes. It substitutes them for artistic insights, and it relies on its audience’s agreement with them to produce a feeling similar to profundity. Sarcasm works best when people already know what you mean.
Picasso was more completely himself in three dimensions: a magician, a magpie genius, a comedic entertainer and a tinkerer with superb reflexes. His many gifts — versatility, voraciousness, a need for constant reinvention — are more sharply apparent in real space and tangible materials. We can’t miss his consummate grasp of tactility and form or of the potential for found objects and materials to lead double lives.Speaking of "staggering," I love photos of people stumbling and bumbling through art galleries, so don't miss the slide show at the link. And let me highlight this one with — amid the Picassos — a choice "living sculpture" I'll call "Man In Shorts."
If the system had totally failed for one team, the league would have shut down both teams’ sets for fairness. That apparently did not happen Thursday night.Apparently...
The Steelers’ website’s account of the game hinted at sinister goings-on: “Strangely enough, whenever an N.F.L. representative proceeded to the New England sideline to shut down their headsets, the Steelers’ headsets cleared. Then, as the representative walked away from the New England sideline, the Steelers’ headsets again started to receive the Patriots’ game broadcast.”
“My mom had an expression: What’s the use of being Irish if you don’t know your life is going to break your heart,” [Colbert] told Biden, while Biden—whose first wife and young daughter were killed 43 years ago in an automobile accident that grievously injured his sons Beau and Hunter—pointed out that his interviewer was himself no stranger to devastating tragedy.But, Colbert continued, he really was the one who had to take care of her. She was shattered. That means that Colbert was to his mother what Hunter and Beau were to Joe Biden, who spoke of how his young sons supported him. I was moved at the realization that these 2 men were — and that point — like a parent and child to each other.
When the 51-year-old Colbert was 10—exactly 41 years ago on September 11, two years after the then-30-year-old Biden lost half his family—Colbert’s physician-father and two of his school-age brothers died in a plane crash....
“I marvel at the ability of people who absorb hurt and just get back up,” Biden said. “You’re one of them, old buddy. Losing your dad when you’re a kid... It’s like asking what made your mother do it every day?”
Colbert chimed in: “She had to take care of me.”
Everything seemed to have turned completely serious all of a sudden, and it was hard to imagine ever getting out of it. That's probably how people often feel in response to the death of a loved one — but that happens privately, not to the whole country at once.
It's interesting to compare how Letterman and Stewart dealt with the situation. In many ways, they were similar: they both highlighted inspiring Americans and lambasted the terrorists' way of life. But their emotional quality was different. Letterman was clearly rattled, but he also had a steadily controlled determination. Jon Stewart seemed absolutely raw and barely able to get through a sentence....
But she denies misleading a woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by Newman wearing a prosthetic penis after they had intercourse, during which the woman wore a blindfold. Newland denies five counts of sexual assault....
[T]he complainant said: “Every time I met up with Kye Fortune, I either had the mask on already or he would wait outside the door and I would put it on. I was so desperate to be loved. It’s pathetic, so desperate for love, so desperate."...
[T]he pair spent at least 100 hours together in person after striking up an intense online relationship over two years, and even became engaged. At each meeting, the complainant wore a blindfold, not just when they had sex but when they sunbathed or watched films together....
With his blue tie loosened and slung over his shoulder, Trump sits back to digest his meal and provide a running byplay to the news. Onscreen, they've cut away to a spot with Scott Walker, the creaky-robot governor of Wisconsin. Praised by the anchor for his "slow but steady" style, Walker is about to respond when Trump chimes in, "Yeah, he's slow, all right! That's what we got already: slowwww." His staffers at the conference table howl and hoot; their man, though, is just getting warm. When the anchor throws to Carly Fiorina for her reaction to Trump's momentum, Trump's expression sours in schoolboy disgust as the camera bores in on Fiorina. "Look at that face!" he cries. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!" The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. "I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"Who doesn't make fun of the faces that come up on the television? Everyone makes fun of Trump's face. So what is it we're not "s'posedta" do? Theoretically, a candidate is supposed to be more careful, more filtered, but unfiltered is what's working for Trump, perhaps in part because we know we talk like that when we're hanging out with people we like and trust. Another way around the Carly's-face problem is to say that he never specified what's wrong with her face — never said she isn't pretty. In human culture, faces are a rich source of information about a person's character, humor, and honesty. "Would anyone vote for that?" is a perfectly good question. And it's a question we ask all the time about Trump's face.
Mike was fed with liquid food and water that the Olsens dropped directly into his oesophagus. Another vital bodily function they helped with was clearing mucus from his throat. They fed him with a dropper, and cleared his throat with a syringe. The night Mike died, they were woken in their motel room by the sound of the bird choking. When they looked for the syringe they realised they had left it at the sideshow, and before they could find an alternative, Mike suffocated....
For a human to lose his or her head would involve an almost total loss of the brain. For a chicken, it's rather different. "You'd be amazed how little brain there is in the front of the head of a chicken," says [Dr Tom Smulders, a chicken expert at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle University]....
Why those who tried to create a Mike of their own did not succeed is hard to explain. It seems the cut, in Mike's case, came in just the right place, and a timely blood clot luckily prevented him bleeding to death....
Torsten Passie, a member of the German government’s expert commission for narcotics, told NDR: “It must have been a multiple overdose. That does not support the view that the people concerned took the hallucinogen knowingly. One has to assume that people were not told about the substance, its effects and risks before taking it.”Aren't these homeopathy people known for pushing a substance that has absolutely no effect at all?
The British Government’s drug advisory service, Frank, describes 2C-E as a psychedelic and hallucinogenic stimulant that has effects “somewhere between ecstasy and LSD”. Anyone taking it experiences a buzz and feeling of being “alive and in tune with their surroundings”, their colours and smells. It can also cause hallucinations, sexual arousal, hypersensitivity and other effects that become “more intense and uncontrollable” with higher doses. The drug is classed as relatively new by Frank....Frank! The British government named its drug advisory service the way you'd name a baby. Frank, indeed. What drug were they on? Did they think a druggy sort of humor would reach out to drug-addled Britons?
"All I remember is, literally your life goes before your eyes. Really. And then I just passed out. It was really weird because I’m not saying I heard noises but my family was talking to me. Just before I passed out I could see both my grandfathers talking to me as if I was a kid. It’s quite emotional when I think back what I went through. It fills me up. Then I just passed out and the next thing I know they dug me up and dragged me out."
MEADE (after reading the post): You say you lost your faith, but that's not where it's at.
ME: I was thinking about Bob Dylan too. I was thinking: "It's something I learned over in England."
MEADE (singing): You say you lost your faith, but that's not where it's at. You had no faith to lose, and you know it.
Davis' attorney, Mat Staver, told NBC News that accommodation was unlikely to suffice. "We're back to Square One," Staver said. "She's been released, but there's been no resolution."No solution, but some of the leverage of empathy for Davis is lost.
I am deeply afraid for my religious freedom. I am an atheist. When an elected official can impose her/his religion on all citizens through their legal position, the first amendment is violated. "The congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion." Kim Davis' opposition to gay marriage is a religious belief and should not be imposed on others through her state position.
Far from protecting children and communities, the California court found, blanket restrictions in fact create a greater safety risk by driving more sex offenders into homelessness, which makes them both harder to monitor and less likely to get essential rehabilitative services like medical treatment, psychotherapy and job assistance.And let me recommend this episode of the Freakonomics podcast, "Making Sex Offenders Pay — and Pay and Pay and Pay." Transcript here. Excerpt:
Residency laws often lead people to live apart from their families, obliterating what is for many the most stabilizing part of their lives....
[N]ot all people who have been convicted of sex offenses pose a risk to children, if they pose any risk at all. Blanket residency-restriction laws disregard that reality — and the merits of an individualized approach to risk assessment — in favor of a comforting mirage of safety.
LEVITT: I think that the registry is really, if you are a sex offender, the registry is just a brutal way of making sure you can never hide. For most other crimes, you’re essentially anonymous. There’s no really easy way for people to know that you’ve done the crimes. And true, when you apply for a job, you’re supposed to say you’re a convicted felon, but nobody really does anyway, and the worst that could happen to you if you don’t say it, is that they just fire you after awhile when they find it out. But the registry is really a different kind of beast because the registry means that no matter where you go or what you’re doing, there are easy, virtually costless ways for people to find out who you are. And it’s hard to say, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, from a deterrence perspective, you think it’s got to be a good thing. That if you know ahead of time that your entire life you’re going to be labeled as a sex offender, it’s got to have some effect in terms of trying to, you know, it’s gotta have some effect in terms of keeping you from doing the crime. But-
DUBNER: Well you said, “if it’s a good deterrent, then it might be worth it, as costly as it may be to the individuals.” What do you know about how much of a deterrent it is? The registry?...
The joke now seems as cruel — and as difficult to explain to millennials — as it seemed hilarious in the 1960s: A young, lithe woman, often in a miniskirt or less, stands onstage. She announces that it’s “sock-it-to-me time.” Then, she is hit with a bucket of water, or dropped through the floor, or otherwise clobbered in some form or fashion. Sure, Richard Nixon famously said the words — but he didn’t have his clothes ripped off.Nor was he hit with anything. He subsequently won the presidency. Meanwhile, Judy Carne, unlike Goldie Hawn, descended into a life of woe.
Between 1977 and 1978, Carne was arrested three times on charges that included drug possession and auto theft.... As Burt Reynolds became a star, Carne arguably became best known as his first wife — the pair were married from 1963 to 1966. When she faced legal trouble in the late 1970s, however, her calls to Reynolds, then on top of the world after his appearance in “Smokey and the Bandit,” were not returned. “At least he could have helped with the legal fees,” Carne said. “After all, I supported him when he was out of work, and I never asked for alimony.”...
“She was a bit of a recluse toward the end,” Jon Barrett, who confirmed her death to the New York Times, said.
“I’m a 1960s flowerchild who has refused to grow up,” she once said, as the Telegraph reported. “‘Mature’ and ‘responsible’ are words I don’t understand.”
Francis himself has said that obtaining annulments can be too cumbersome and costly, dragging on for years and costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars.Some people give up on giving up on their marriages. Or should I say their marriages that are not really marriages because they are nullities and these poor people are deprived of the benefit of the formal recognition of the nothingness of the thing that prevents them from moving on and getting a real marriage?
"Some procedures are so long and so burdensome," the pontiff said in 2014, "and people give up."
Not that we have to agree with that view, but the question is whether the (possibly oath-based) proceduralist argument (“do your job or engage in revolution, but if you do that you have to quit, because OMG the oath”) should carry any logical weight with adherents of that view. While I think acceptable resistance against Nazis differs from acceptable resistance against liberal democratic governments, the reason I think that has nothing to do with oaths, and it’s not clear to me how an oath-based theory would successfully distinguish between the two situations.Also at Volokh Conspiracy and getting much more attention (ranking high on WaPo's most-read list), is Eugene Volokh's "When does your religion legally excuse you from doing part of your job?," which focuses on law as it is, as opposed to morality, revolution, and disobedience.
Bottom line: I’m fine continuing to criticize Davis on substantive moral grounds. And I’m fine showing why Davis’s actions are illegal under the positive law; but once you get to the point where you’re making the illegality serve a normative goal, you have to confront issues of legitimate disobedience, and I’m not sure that a purely procedural (“quit or do your job”) argument will work to exclude Davis’s “keep your job but follow your ideals” strategy of disobedience.
civil disobedience n. rebellion of the populace against a governing power; (in later use) spec. refusal to obey the laws, commands, etc., of a government or authority as part of an organized, non-violent political protest or campaign.
Rule #5: I will pay close attention to the poets and poems that have been underrepresented in the past. So that means I will carefully look for great poems by women and people of color....Most of the rules — please read the whole thing — were about neutrality and not showing favoritism. 60% of the poems he chose were written by women, 40% by "people of color." One poem Alexie chose turned out to have been written by a white male, Michael Derrick Hudson, who'd adopted the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou — in Alexie's words — "as a means of subverting what he believes to be a politically correct poetry business." Alexie only learned of the ruse after he picked the poem, and he was "angry at the subterfuge," but he decided to keep the poem in the anthology and to share his soul-searching over what to do about "this colonial theft." (The boldface below is mine.)
So am I saying that Mr. Trump is better and more serious than he’s given credit for being? Not at all — he is exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be. It’s when it comes to his rivals that appearances can be deceiving. Some of them may come across as reasonable and thoughtful, but in reality they are anything but.
Mr. Bush, in particular, may pose as a reasonable, thoughtful type — credulous reporters even describe him as a policy wonk — but his actual economic platform, which relies on the magic of tax cuts to deliver a doubling of America’s growth rate, is pure supply-side voodoo.
And here’s what’s interesting: all indications are that Mr. Bush’s attacks on Mr. Trump are falling flat, because the Republican base doesn’t actually share the Republican establishment’s economic delusions....
"I heard 'please' and 'Martin' being uttered by Denise Richard," said Steve Woolfenden, who was lying on the pavement next to Martin and his mother after the second bomb exploded. "Just pleading with her son."...
Woolfenden's left leg had been sheared off below the knee. He described frantically trying to get his 3-year-old son, Leo, out of his stroller after he heard him screaming and saw he was bleeding from the side of his head. As he lay helpless on the pavement, he spotted Martin and Denise Richard.
Some French media have asked if the novel’s title ["Submission"] really refers to the position of women.... Houellebecq had originally thought feminists would take issue with it. “In fact, they haven’t taken it that badly,” he says. “That’s why people are unpredictable.”
Why does he think the issue of women in the novel hasn’t sparked a bigger response? “I don’t know. It’s possible that in truth there aren’t really that many feminists.” Is he a feminist? “No, no.” A misogynist, as has been levelled against him? “No, no, not that either,” he says. “But it’s possible that feminism has slightly disappeared from women too ... It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone expressing a feminist opinion. I can’t remember the last time. In France, anyway.”
Not that I believed for a moment that it would be easy, especially for someone who hadn’t built anything out of wood in twenty-five years and even then only a barely passable book shelf. But possible. Possible. It must be possible if you studied up on how it was done, chose a simple and manageable plan and set about doing it. It must be doable if I set my mind to it. And from that moment, walking along the beach with my older son, the idea took hold of me....
Yes. And people have said, "Why are you calling us racists?" I say, "No, I'm not calling the party racist. I'm just saying, if you look at it, you will see that there's some in the party who practice a level of intolerance that is not good for the party and is not consistent with American values."
CHUCK TODD: Your name gets invoked a lot during this email controversy. Once and for all, can you explain what you did with your emails as secretary of state?Obvious inference: Hillary inherited the updated system and didn't need to fix anything to get started.
COLIN POWELL: You can read my book. I wrote a whole chapter about what I did in my latest book. It Worked for Me, Harper Collins, you can buy it on Amazon. But the point is I arrived at the State Department as secretary with a disastrous information system there. And I had to fix it. And so what I had to do is bring the State Department to the 21st century.
And the way of doing that was getting new computers. That gave them access to the whole world. And then in order to make sure that I changed the brainware of the department, and not just the software and hardware, I started to use email. I had two machines on my desk. I had a secure State Department machine, which I used for secure material, and I had a laptop that I could use for email. And I would email relatives, friends, but I would also email in the department. But it was mostly housekeeping stuff. "What's the status in this paper? What's going on here?" So it was my own classified system, but I had a classified system also on my desk.That's pretty hard to understand, actually. "Mostly" housekeeping? So, not all housekeeping (whatever counts as "housekeeping"!). The reason to use email is to "make sure" that the "brainware" has been changed? What is it about email that gives special assurance that things have changed, and what's the point of using the strange word "brainware"? I assume he means something like "wetware" (jargon for human brains), but "brainware" does not Google (other than as the name of a software company). I can't get to any online definitions of the word, which also appears nowhere in the NYT archive (other than as the name of that company). Is Powell being obfuscatory or is this just how the man talks?
COLIN POWELL: I can't answer that. You know, we now have two IGs working on it, we have the F.B.I. working on it. Mrs. Clinton and some of her associates will be testifying, or be going before inquiries with the Congress. And I think it's best for me to talk about what I know and not about what occurred under Secretary Clinton's jurisdiction.Now, maybe what he's thinking is it's more dignified to keep silent and most useful for him to say what he did and let others figure out the comparisons. He has, after all, first hand knowledge of what he did, and it's only a matter of opinion how close that is to what Hillary did. And to state one's opinion is to undermine the value of that opinion, because everyone who's invoking his name seems to already be for or against Hillary. To say she only did what Powell did, more or less, is to reveal yourself as pro-Hillary, and to say what Powell did was different is to align with the anti-Hillary crowd. Therefore Powell has his best credibility if he keeps his silence.
"Well, he says, 'Who am I to judge?' But he's the one who can do something to change doctrine, and to change that the church carries out the things that it does," she says. "So he kind of is the one to judge, and to change the way that things are done."
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, campaign finance reform, voting rights reform?... And you're saying that if you run, if you are running, if you win, if you become president and you pass that platform, you'll resign.Reminds me of when Howard Stern ran for Governor of New York. He said he'd fix 3 things and then resign. (His 3 things were: "pass the death penalty, let road crews work only at night, stagger highway tolls to prevent traffic jams.")
LESSIG: That's right.
No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small. A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this “i” can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, or rather more than the number of seconds it takes to make half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least."In my mind's eye" comes from Shakespeare. Here's a block of text from another Bill Bryson book, "Shakespeare":
Just a small sampling of phrases originally found in Shakespeare’s works include flesh and blood, bated breath, tower of strength, foul play, foregone conclusion, good riddance, dead as a doornail, fool’s paradise, heart of gold, Greek to me, fancy-free, devil incarnate, one fell swoop, for goodness’ sake, vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, eaten me out of house and home, elbow room, go down the primrose path, in a pickle, budge an inch, cold comfort, household word, full circle, salad days, in my heart of hearts, in my mind’s eye, laughing stock, love is blind, lie low, naked truth, neither rhyme nor reason, star-crossed lovers, pitched battle, pound of flesh, sea change, make short shrift, spotless reputation, set my teeth on edge, there’s the rub, too much of a good thing, what the dickens, and wild goose chase.Must I get back to my list of many shots I can take at the movie "A Walk in the Woods"? They added sexual things (even though the movie is generally overly, stupidly "family friendly"). There was a sequence — completely made up — with Mary Steenburgen as the owner of a crappy motel, and she tries to put the move on Redford after he comes out of his room to the motel office to ask for towels. He's wearing a nice bathrobe and leather slippers. Who, going out on a months-long hike, would put a bathrobe and slippers in his backpack?! In the book-world of Bill Bryson, there is absolutely no chance that he would be unfaithful to his beloved wife or even that he would amuse us with the slightest thought of being unfaithful to her. The sexual temptation scene was just squicky.
Cheryl Cerk said her son didn't even know how to drive a nail into a piece of wood before he began researching tiny homes, but hundreds of hours of YouTube-watching walked him through the entire process....Here's the Daily Mail version of the story — that is, less text, more pictures (and — I know — man in shorts).
The house, nearly finished but in livable condition, has steel double doors at the entrance, a compostable toilet, a shower and two 100-watt solar panels, which will supply enough power to charge his cellphone and laptop, light the home and provide fuel to power for his cook-top in the kitchen.
So if we find out that women's brains really are different from men's, in ways that are driven not by the environment in which they are raised but the hormones suffusing their brain, we're going to need to start by rethinking the ways that we identify sexism in the first place -- and then start thinking about what sort of remedies might be appropriate. This is going to be an even longer, messier negotiation than the one we're having now.If it's hormones, and one can take hormones, should we have our choice of hormones, allowing us to go further in whichever direction we prefer?
There's perhaps something amiss in a ranking that places Red Lake County at the absolute bottom of the nation when it comes to scenery and climate. As I noted in my original story, the USDA's index places a lot of emphasis on mild weather and a little less on true scenic beauty, which of course is harder to quantify. But there's no doubt that the Red Lake County region is flat-out gorgeous. In a phone interview, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called it a "stark beauty," and I think she's right. And you can see that beauty everywhere, from the open farm country to the craggy bluffs and hills of the river valley.Lists that take account of climate are going to systematically undervalue The North. That said, Ingraham did not visit in winter.
For some of us, it takes a place as small as Red Lake County to drive home just how big this country really is.
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