June 2011
13 posts
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Picture It.
The West Wing, Friday, June 24, 2011 Presidential Daily Briefing
“Good morning, Mr. President. Some updates for you on Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, a problem in Senegal, new jobless claims don’t look good, unemployment isn’t budging, the debt ceiling talks have stalled, the Dow took another shit yesterday, and…
“…a rogue group going by the name...
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“The essence of any utopianism is: Conjure an ideal that makes an impossible...”
– The Liberty Scam, by Stephen Metcalf.
Honest question?
Everyone who uses the internet (or at least everyone who isn’t a terrible person—which, yes, significantly reduces the scope of the word “everyone” here, I know, but in any event) is in widespread agreement that content farms and scraper sites are pretty awful. I mean, remember how we all applauded when Google updated its algorithms to combat copycat sites from beating out...
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The Glasses of the 23 Secretaries of Defense, In...
Robert McNamara (1961-68)
Frank Carlucci (1987-89)
Les Aspin (1993-94)
Harold Brown (1977-81)
Leon Panetta (2011-)
Elliot Richardson (1973)
Donald Rumsfeld (1975-77, 2001-06)
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Our Way To Fail
It was a tale of two failures—and how they were responded to—told just a week apart.
Last Sunday, LeBron lost. Again. And as is so often the case with LeBron, there was much post-game hemming and hawing about who or what was to blame. Heavy on excuses and typically light on contrition: “We” didn’t move the ball well enough or “we” played perfectly well except for...
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the...
A few weeks back Ray Lewis sat down with Sal Paulantonio to talk lockout, and somehow, even through the dense fog of crazy that usually materializes whenever Ray Lewis opens his mouth, I caught a few glimmers of clarity.
Lewis talked about who really stood to suffer from this lockout, and he insisted (with even more intensity than he’s ever plugged a stick of Old Spice) that it was the...
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#longrants
Way back in the stone age when we all still subscribed to home delivery of newspapers and magazines (and you’ll just have to bear with me here if you’re under the age of 20), all that content we’d get delivered to our doorstep—whether it came from the Times or the New Yorker or Sports Illustrated or US Weekly or National Geographic or Highlights (Highlights!)—was really only part...
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Words with friends
I’m riding the subway this morning, reading a book, when a funny passage laboriously pushes a pre-coffee early morning laugh out of me, only it emerges more like a half-chortle, a laugh forced to expire prematurely once the awareness of my surroundings sank in—that I wasn’t a man laughing at a book so much as a man laughing at a book, alone, on the subway—and I remembered how very...