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Egypt’s bureaucracy just took a blow. The building that symbolizes long waits, frustrating government, and rubber stamped permits is being torn down. Today’s Washington Post reported that downtown Cairo’s Mugamma–Arabic for ‘the complex,’ will be torn down in June, moving the minstry offices into scattered offices in the suburbs. “It […]
Today’s Boston Globe included a story by Colin Nickerson about the despair that is everywhere in the former East Germany, and the struggle there between the once prosperous west and their poor brothers in the East. “Today marks the 15th anniversary of the unification of the collapsed communist East and […]
Deep beneath the waves a weird fish has swallowed the grandson of the late Captain Jacques Cousteau, the ocean explorer. Fabien Cousteau, 36, is these days to be found inside the belly of a submersible built in the shape of a great white shark. Matthew Campbell wrote for Times on […]
Hillary August writes in the Yale Daily News about CNN’s Anderson Cooper and his passion for crew. “Instead of devoting extracurricular hours to honing his journalistic skills with one of the campus publications, Cooper devoted himself to the Yale crew team. After failing to keep up with his teammates and […]
Today’s NY Times style section includes this set of tales about weddings. “Her most vivid recollection involved a particularly brutish upstaging during a lavish wedding, just as the newlyweds began their first dance. As the number started, the groom’s college fraternity brothers, who were also on the wrestling team with […]
Last night after crunchy, spicy tuna rolls at our favorite Japanese restaurant Moshi Moshi in Northampton, we went to the little Pleasant St. theater to see “Grizzly Man.” Narrated by the filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his deep German accent, the film follows the travels and eventual demise of Tim Treadwell, […]
Driving back in the bright September sun, I passed a group of dark skinned men playing cricket in North Amherst. One man stood in front of a stake and the other pitched at him as he held his large bat. Amherst was a beehive of human activity, there was an […]
Today a man named Paul Schmidt came by the house. He wore a Red Sox baseball cap and held a clipboard. He works for Honeywell, and was there to inspect my new furnace. As gas and oil prices go up and up, I thought about how much more important people […]
Nikki Finke writes with a sharpened pencil in the LA Weekly. She published this screed after Michael Kinsley got bumped out of the editorial page job at the LA Times in early August. “The Kinsley Experiment, which officially ended this week at the Los Angeles Times not with a bang […]
Tina Brown writes about a place I wish I could have been, Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative conference at the Sheraton Hotel in New York last week “Welcome to Planet Clinton, an interconnected world that’s a solar system and a wormhole away from Bush country. Here Shimon Peres and Oprah Winfrey […]
Foud Ajami writes in the Opinion Journal on the deafening silence from Arabs. “The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose […]
Firemen wore SS uniforms, reported Ananova today on the Howie Carr website. “Two German firemen are in trouble after they tried on Nazi SS uniforms they found in an old farmhouse. The firefighters reportedly paraded up and down in the uniforms in front of a group of boy scouts. The […]