Saturday, November 30, 2002

What do the original cast of Saturday Night Live, German idealist philosophers, and the British group called the Lunar Men have in common? Malcolm Gladwell explains in this New Yorker article.

Thursday, November 28, 2002

All five sources of TV news are now divisions of large conglomerates. In this New York Times column, Paul Krugman discusses the question: Will the economic interests of the media undermine objective news coverage?
About 120 million Americans don't vote. This Atlantic Monthly review of the book Where Have All The Voters Gone? discusses who these nonvoters are and why they don't vote.

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

The Wall Street Journal has discovered a new problem -- poor people don't pay enough taxes. The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne explains.

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

In this article from the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg compares and contrasts the Windsor dynasty of Great Britain and the Bush dynasty of the U.S.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Will the United States go to war with Iraq? Slate calculates the odds with its Saddameter. As of November 19, 2002, the odds for an invasion are 56%.

Saturday, November 16, 2002

According to this column by Tom Friedman of the New York Times, the war in Afghanistan showed that "most NATO countries have fallen so far behind the U.S. in their defense spending and modernizations, they really can't fight alongside of us anymore". While NATO still exists, "The old NATO has been replaced as a military alliance — not by the expanded NATO but by a totally different NATO. The "new NATO" is made up of three like-minded English-speaking allies — America, Britain and Australia — with France as a partner for peace, depending on the war."

This article shows this new military alliance at work. It describes the blockade of Iraqi oil in the Persian Gulf by the Australian, British, and U.S. Navies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Marines are training in Djibouti, a small nation in the Horn of Africa that used to be a French colony. This New York Times article describes a recent U.S. Marine amphibious warfare exercise there.

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote at least 849 compositions. While several hundred of these works have been recorded on one medium or another, there still remain hundreds of other works which have never been recorded. That's where the Unheard Beethoven comes in. Go to their website to download never-before-heard Beethoven compositions in MIDI and MP3 formats.

Friday, November 08, 2002

It's official. Brett Favre is a national treasure.
Almost all of the journalists and pundits predicted that the Democrats would retain control of the Senate in last Tuesday's election. Now that the election is over, the journalists and pundits are trying to figure out where they and the Democrats went wrong.

Here are election postmortems from:

E. J. Dionne,

Jonathan Alter,

MyDD.com,

Talking Points Memo,

Paul Krugman, and

ABC News.com's The Note.

Meanwhile, The Scrum looks at how the 2002 election results will affect the 2004 Presidential elections.

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Please vote today. If you don't vote you can't complain for the next two years.

Here's the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on the election.

For results and comentary on the election try the blogs MyDD.com and TalkingPointsMemo.