Gape upon the greatness that once was presidential campaign slander ... something old and something new — but none of it was impromptu ...

Money and vision are inseparable. The enduring question is where the money would come from ... an exclusive enclave on the outskirts of Islamabad ... the mega-budget tent-pole movies ... looming above the ocean, like dusty mushrooms ...

Texas is going through a dry spell ... Effective government was never this region's strong suit.

The Chinese must not understand the cheesy side of capitalism yet, because someone has clearly missed a big chance to cash in.

He has become a middle-management cultural icon -- vulgar, puerile and needlessly gross, a feisty and jovial mood -- who has been exceedingly gracious with his valuable time. The hero, in his porn days, had "buttocks ripe like the plump half-melons for which Japanese businessmen will pay a small fortune." All of this was the result of neglect that was politely called deferred maintenance. Old-school journalists may bemoan the changes, but viewers do not necessarily suffer. My skin was as soft and clean as undisturbed yogurt.

Mr. Schmidt was impressed by Mr. Obama. "He listened more than he talked, which is always a good thing," Mr. Schmidt says. "He clearly sees himself as a clever synthesizer of other people's ideas. And I think that is an important skill in a president."

Or, in the blunter words of Gov. Phil Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee: "Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

What reflects the human-size soap opera that is the life of a real teenager are all the casually stinging asides, the surge and abrupt decline of social power, the unforgivable betrayals and gnawing insecurities that the kids experience.

There is rage. And most important, there are rules.

This is like a parking lot. But it is what it is.

"Students are desperate for hands-on experience," says Neil Gershenfeld.

"All I know is, there is water where it didn't used to be."

"This new reality," she added, "is a lot more pleasant."

She knew how to exploit a rich idea.

"I didn't think it was possible for her to do it, or anyone to do it, for an entire year."

We Americans demand too much from our athletes, particularly our girls.

"Only the real special ones can do this kind of thing."

They blame "imperfect" systems for monitoring such problems.

And then there are the culprits of a more conceptual kind.

Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible.

Parents were alarmed. Blogs buzzed.

"You can't stop them and ask them what their names are."

"The consensus was that we should just let it peter out," he said.

School is school, you know. "Looters are looters," said Pyotr Taslagan.

It's not the problem, and it's not the answer.

The hulking timbers illustrate Gehry's obsession with "big wood" ... which probably says more about ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

She compared herself to a "plump caterpillar" waiting to break free of its cocoon.

Jenny has had a hard life, even by elephant standards. Now, Jenny has become the focus of a boisterous debate about what to do with an aging elephant with a troubled mind.

Where they stopped, they were met by throngs of people who crowded at the windows, hoping to be given a plastic bag that included breads, sausage and canned goods.

"She worried about being shlumpy, and the word 'shlumpadinka' was thrown around a lot."

That could happen if passengers reach a personal tipping point.

Some, though appalled, emphasize that there is a danger in opting out as well.

The most poignant scene was the triple burial of a petite woman lying on her side, facing two young children.

So the converse is clearly not a good idea either.

Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?

What about women’s gymnastics?

The performances are incredible and fearless, but it isn’t the athleticism that draws me in.

It’s not that they tippy-toe around either.

Mothers living near highways are more likely to give birth to preterm or low-birth-weight babies, but contrary to previous studies it found the association only in wealthy neighborhoods.

But minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes.

Who is buying Zunes, and why?

There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

And those who are obsessed have a whole new range of technological tools to indulge their obsession.

“Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I’ve spoken about the importance of living with fewer things. But my position is a little ambiguous.”

Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.

Elvis Presley’s most treasured performance costume, a peacock jumpsuit, was sold to an unidentified bidder on gottahaveit.com for $300,000. The white costume is decorated with an embroidered blue-and-gold peacock emblazoned on the back, with blue peacock feathers trailing down both flared pants legs.

Yes! That’s what I was experiencing, too. Those garish colors, that craziness and freedom, that painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not.

One mother says: “We shouldn’t blame the Americans for everything. There is something wrong with us too.”

The American video game ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

King believes that the impulse to collect comes "partly from a wound we feel deep inside this richest, most materialistic of all societies." But he also considers other possibilities -- "It finds order in things, virtue in preservation, knowledge in obscurity, and above all it discovers and even creates value." His own fondness is for "the mute, meager, practically valueless object. ... What I like is the potency of the impotent thing, the renewed and adorable life I find in the dead and despised object." For him, there's "something in nothing." A lot of nothing.

"There are a lot of really great stories out there," said museum director/curator Karen Bachmann, "and time to share with the community."

Many definitions of distraction exist. An April report by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, for example, describes three basic, unofficial categories: purposeful, incidental and uncontrolled.

My observation of people in general, not just my clients, is that we desperately want to take a break from our hectic, overscheduled lives--but not right now. Try it: Put down this magazine and do nothing at all for ten minutes. No planning, no worrying, no activity of any kind. Just ten minutes of empty time.

Did you do it?

I thought not.

After the salted yak butter tea had been served, the chief continued: "If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Mr. Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea."

Perhaps owning a personal vehicle is a false entitlement that will become economically impossible for many of us in the near future. But something will need to fill the void.

Over a stove burning dung in the centre of the main room, Lhamotso boils a kettle of water to make yak-butter tea, a salty brew popular here. The television is the only appliance.

"I ... [ Read More (1.0k in body) ]

According to Paola, our kids started off right because she breast-fed them, which “opened their taste buds.” I’m not sure that’s scientific. It’s possible Italians are so haughty about their cuisine that they think even their breast milk is superior.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

“This is not something that lends itself to short-term solutions.”

“The continued success of GTA IV is not translating into big hardware sales for the PS3 or the 360.”

When the governments of South Africa, China, Libya and Indonesia support Sudan’s positions in Darfur, do they really mean to adopt a pro-rape foreign policy?

Since poorer Americans spend a higher proportion of their incomes on low-wage imports (shoes from China, for instance), trade can also be seen as favoring the less well off. If only politicians would stop preaching to them otherwise.

Age of Conan has at least the potential to become the best new massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft.

New York City during the 1970s was a beautiful, ravaged slag — impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore.

And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“Now is the greatest time to be bartering,” Scott Ebberbach of Itex, a bartering outfit, recently told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “Unfortunately, it’s that way because of the economy.” Unfortunately.

It’s true. I thought cheese was the color of a traffic cone, each slice individually wrapped in plastic.

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

Painfully slowly, the United Nations and its member states seem to be recognizing the fact that systematic mass rape is at least as much an international outrage as, say, pirated DVDs.

The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years.

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.

In college, I had a friend named Kurt. A lot of people know someone like Kurt in college — brilliant, obsessive and kind of scary.

The Russians are coming from all over.

American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was reassuring to them.

Rio’s slums, or favelas, have proliferated and now may number more than 800.

Destee Nation is not selling nostalgia or hipster kitsch but romance — the romance of the American small business, the neighborhood diner, the old bar, the mom-and-pop shop that has managed to linger into the era of big-box chains.

I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son’s cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.
“Scorpions!” shrieked my son, Roy. “Awesome!”

The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

There are two main conclusions: First, when bubbles are not based on bank lending, the mop-up-after strategy still looks pretty good. When it comes to bank-centered bubbles, however, there are many more things that a central bank can and should do. But raising interest rates to burst the bubble is probably not one of them.

“Each season had a distinctive aroma and its own set of sounds. In the winter ... the smell was of heavy wool socks drying near the stove. In spring it was the black soil warming and the sound of returning crows. Summer brought the smell of the poplars and the sounds of rustling leaves, frogs croaking in sloughs. ... In the summer came the grasshoppers.”

Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything.

The good news: More Egyptians today can afford to live like Americans. The bad news: Even more Egyptians can’t even afford to live like Egyptians anymore. This is not good — not for them, not for us.

The takeover was like wind blowing over a moth-infested structure.

“When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you,” he said.

In Saudi Arabia I once met two young members of the National Guard, Saleh and Abdullah. As we drank coffee in a cafe, I asked if they knew anything about Jews and Christians. They didn’t, but Abdullah seemed curious. He said he’d like to read a book about other faiths, but none was available in the kingdom.
Saleh objected. “Well, what if you read a story and it made sense to you so you believe it,” he said. “It can reduce your faith.”
They both agreed: Better not to read.

... a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia ...

Much better is to use the option to reverse search, finding people who want Brooklyn and seeing what they have to trade. Put myself back in the driver’s seat.

It’s good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

She has given up everything but the T-shirts.

Behind every great pianist is a great tuner.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, laments, “The consensus is gone.”

In Fiona’s mind the medical paraphernalia of paralysis has an erotic power similar to that of the accoutrements of sadomasochism. An elaborate brace, for instance, is the ne plus ultra in sexy lingerie.

Trustafarians like John William usually grow out of their Prince Hal phase by their mid-20s, in plenty of time to make partner in Dad’s firm by 35. Not John William.

The farmer in Khujayli recalled a car trip with his father in the winter of 1954 near the city of Muynoq that began with a crossing of miles of Aral Sea ice. Now the shore is more than 50 miles away from the city. In the 1970s, his grandfather’s apricot trees died. Salt eats away at shoes here and turns bricks white. “For so many years we raped the land,” said the farmer. “This is the result.”

The journalists assumed that a slum under the thumb of a gun-toting militia, which included off-duty policemen, would be safer than one controlled by drug dealers.
They were wrong.

(Pretentiousness? That’s the noun form of the adjective pretentious, created by adding the suffix -ness. But wouldn’t it be better to use the shorter noun pretension? Or the even shorter noun, pretense? No; sometimes brevity asks too much. In the synonymy of pompous fakery, the mouth-filling pretentiousness goes beyond “characterized by pretension” to mean “affectedly showing off one’s claimed erudition or prestige,” as exemplified in this paragraph.)

If you’re not lucky enough to raise your children in China with an Italian mom, you could always try bribery.

Comcast says that people who use too much — like those who engage in file-sharing — should be forced to slow down.

Officials say some drivers are pretending to be out of gas, just so they can receive a precious, free gallon of fuel.

Even when they work, I find their furtive nature offensive.

At American, executives have heard loud and clear objections from flight attendants, whose jobs will become more burdensome as they police battles for bin space, especially as vacationing families load up.

(No one likes a proselytizer.)

You guessed right if you thought the toilets of CBGB's sang a song of diseased lust to my raging hormones.

Save waste fats for explosives. Take them to your meat dealer.

Only happy hookers write memoirs.

Hamas is Fatah with beards.