Politics
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Haaretz Lets Novelists Write News, Flotilla Or No Flotilla
Last year at about this time, the Israeli paper Haaretz let a bunch of literary writers report the news to celebrate Israel’s book week. Well, they’re doing it again, but this time, there’s a flotilla involved. Authors include Margaret Atwood,…
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Birds Caught in the Oil
“AP Photographer Charlie Riedel filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana’s East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming…
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Bowden On Juárez
“The way I was trained, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I…
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Why Christopher Hitchens Doesn’t Matter
Hitchens’ new memoir Hitch-22 is a sprawling self-portrait of a name-dropper and a hanger-on.
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Spill Links
About time: “Feds open criminal probe of Gulf oil spill.” Director James Cameron, “considered an expert on underwater filming and remote vehicle technologies,” met with scientists and officials from federal agencies “for a brainstorming session on stopping the massive oil…
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Andrei Voznesensky
“Mr. Voznesensky and poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky burst onto the stage in the cultural ‘thaw’ that followed Stalin’s death in 1953 and rose to extraordinary stardom in the 1960s, filling whole stadiums for poetry readings…
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White Torture
“After I recanted my false confession, my main interrogator essentially told me he knew I was not a spy. My captors may have wanted to use my false confession to intimidate Iranians advocating better relations with the West. They may…
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MetaFilter to the Rescue
“The message thread reads like the play-by-play from an alternate reality game, wherein complete strangers work together to solve a complex mystery. But the drama that played out on MetaFilter this week was no game. If not for the intrepid…
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Politics Sunday
Nick Spicer asks if BP might have something in common with Captain Ahab. Apparently, there was a time when presidents weren’t all rich guys. How an online community saved two Russian women from falling prey to sex traffickers. Did you…
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When Should We Publish Horrific Images?
“The point of publishing horrific images is to anger, sadden, appall, help us mourn, teach us about the world, and make us feel compelled to act.” — Ruthie Ackerman discusses her decision to post photographs, with a disclaimer, of the…
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Swinging in China
“In private, the professor, Ma Yaohai, 53, led a life that became intolerable to Chinese authorities: for the past six years, he was a member of informal swingers clubs that practiced group sex and partner swapping. In online chat rooms,…