This weekend in 1933, Prohibition ended in the U.S. And it's been downhill ever since, don't you think?
Magnum Photos culls its archives for a celebration of libation:
Chicago neighbourhood tavern, 1948. Wayne Miller, Magnum Photos.
New York City, 1956. Elliott Erwitt, Magnum Photos.
Santa leaves a New York bar, 1968. Bruce Gilden, Magnum Photos.
Fashion show reception, New York, 1997. Ferdinando Scianna, Magnum Photos.
Collection produced by Zena Koo for Magnum Photos and Slate.
OU EST LA VIE DU NUIT?
Paris struggles to reverse new reputation for dull nightlife. (Der Spiegel)
TURNING A HEALTH-CARE EDICT UPSIDE-DOWN
The Breast Brouhaha (Gail Collins, New York Times)
Somewhere between the reports that Pap smears and tests for prostate cancer aren’t all they were cracked up to be and the news that a high fiber diet doesn’t do anything to prevent cancer, the health establishment began looking decidedly nonomniscient. Then this week, a federal task force reported that most women don’t need annual mammograms.
Even more fascinating, they suggested that doctors stop telling their female patients to self-examine their breasts for lumps.
If you happen to be a woman, particularly a somewhat obsessive woman, this is huge news. The to-do list just got one item shorter. Now if dentists would just decide to withdraw the flossing directive, we may have enough additional spare time to learn Spanish.
GENDER AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Poor women bear the brunt of climate change. (Der Spiegel)
Living in the most marginalized areas and dependent on agriculture to survive, it is the poor who are in the front line of climate change. Given that most of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 a day or less are women, they are in the most vulnerable position, said the United Nations Population Fund report, The State of World Population 2009.
In addition, women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters, especially among poorer people. "With the possibility of a climate catastrophe on the horizon, we cannot relegate the world's 3.4 billion women and girls to the role of victim," a report co-author said.
Celebration earlier this year of 60th anniversary of People's Republic of China, Polishing nation's world image a priority for President Hu Jintao (pictured above). -AFP
IMAGE MAKEOVER
Beijing's great PR offensive. (Der Spiegel)
China's E4.4-billion global media plan includes a continued crackdown on "subversive" Internet bloggers but also using the Internet to broadcast the state-run CCTV-9 worldwide; new English-language editions of party newspapers to enhance regime's image; and development of global conventional TV networks.
WHO KNEW?
Marilyn Monroe's determined role in boosting Ella Fitzgerald's career. (Times of London)
Seattle skyline.
NASCENT BOOMTOWNS?
Five U.S. cities that will rise in the New Economy:
They are Boston; Houston; Huntsville, Ala.; Fort Collins, Colo; and Seattle. They have in common high-skilled workers, focus on clean tech, and above-average quality of life. (Christian Science Monitor)
REVOLUTIONS TRANQUILLE
Can we make a model of Czechoslovakia's 1989 non-violent "Velvet Revolution"? (Timothy Garten Ash, New York Review of Books)
Across the intervening years [since 1989], dramatic events in places including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, South Africa, Chile, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, and Burma were tagged with variants of adjective + revolution. Thus we have read about singing (Baltic states), peaceful, negotiated (South Africa, Chile), rose (Georgia), orange (Ukraine), color (widely used, post-orange), cedar (Lebanon), tulip (Kyrgyzstan), electoral (generic), saffron (Burma), and most recently, in Iran, green revolution. Often, as in the original Czechoslovak case, the catchy labeling has been popularized through the interplay of foreign journalists and political activists in the countries concerned.
These events could, with widely varying degrees of plausibility, be described as attempts—by no means all of them successful—to make a 1989 kind of peaceful, negotiated regime change, including elements of mass protest, social mobilization, and nonviolent action. Velvet revolution, it seems, has not just a past but also a present and perhaps a future. Starting as the moniker for a single historical event—the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989—it has cast off the definite article to become simply "velvet revolution": the genus VR.
GLOBAL HUNGER'S LAND RUSH
Is there such a thing as agro-imperialism? (Andrew Rice, New York Times Magazine)
Because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent, according to one estimate, if you take out forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa. According to a recent study by the World Bankand the United NationsFood and Agriculture Organization, one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land is the billion-acre Guinea Savannah zone, a crescent-shaped swath that runs east across Africa all the way to Ethiopia, and southward to Congo and Angola.
Foreign investors — some of them representing governments, some of them private interests — are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also feeds more Africans. (More than a third of the continent’s population is malnourished.) They’ve found that impoverished governments are often only too welcoming, offering land at giveaway prices. A few transactions have received significant publicity, like Kenya’s deal to lease nearly 100,000 acres to the Qatari government in return for financing a new port, or South Korea’s agreement to develop almost 400 square miles in Tanzania. But many other land deals, of near-unprecedented size, have been sealed with little fanfare. (Photo: Farm worker on Indian-owned rice and corn farm in Western Ethipoia. By Simon Norfolk,New York Times.)
SHOPPING PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CASHIER'S LIFE
Please enter your PIN. (Rachel Bowlby, London Review of Books)
When self-service came along, this supplanted scene looked different depending on how you regarded the new practice. For one side it became a spectacle of old-fashioned dirt, disorder and rip-offs. Now, thankfully, the customer was in control and could pick out the things she wanted, in her own time: no shoddy goods slipped in, no waiting about, no grubby hands on her potatoes and no intrusively personal attention to what she was buying. For defenders of the old procedure, the same story spun itself the other way round. Self-service meant the blandness of plastic packaging and the loss of human familiarity, of the shopkeeper who knew and cared about his stock and his customers. It also meant that you were doing the work yourself.
SPYING FOR THE STATE
It began with opening other people's mail: A history of MI5. (Bernard Porter, London Review of Books) Photo: Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, 1965.
For most of the 19th century, espionage was thought to be a low and foreign practice that the British – or at any rate the English – should not stoop to in any circumstances. This was for a number of reasons: because it used deception, which was immoral; because the state could not always be relied on not to abuse it; and because it was counter-productive, since foreign espionage was often claimed as a cause of war, and domestic surveillance was considered intrinsically damaging to the trust people needed to have in their governments, and in each other, if they were to be content and thus politically stable.
DUNCE-CAP ECONOMISTS
Economists chronically fail by discounting human behaviour. (John Gray, London Review of Books)
Each of these manifestations of animal spirits shows behaviour being driven by forces other than reason. None of them offers rational grounds for action in any sense that most economists would recognise. Even so, the authors insist, these responses must enter into any account of how economies actually work. If economists have failed to explain repeated crises, it is because they have interpreted economic activity through an unreal model of rational decision-making. Thinking of human behaviour in this way allows them to claim a high degree of precision for their discipline, which is presented as a kind of applied mathematics. But they have left psychology out of their equations.
Left to right: Timothy Geithner, treasury secretary; Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisors; Barack Obama; and Lawrence Summers, chief economic adviser.
DEBATE
Obama's economic team rescued the global financial system, with remarkable finesse. (David Brooks, New York Times)
Obama's economic team, attuned only to what Wall Street wants, is worsening the economic crisis by failing to grasp Main Street's pain. (Paul Krugman, New York Times)
THE IRREPRESIBLE GOURMAND
Our fixation with cookbooks. (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)
Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jansci slices, Sacher Torte with apricot jam between the layers. The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.
THE SPLENDID TABLE - CHRISTMAS EDITION
21 tips for for Christmas from Britain's most acclaimed foodies.
The art of carving, Italian treats, Christmas breakfast, the perfect cheese board, and Roast Pheasant with Chestnut Dumplings and other recipes galore. (Times of London)
THE END IS NIGH (NOT)
Six 2012 end-of-the-world myths debunked. (National Geographic)
FEASTS FOR THE EYES
The AGO spotlights work of trailblazing photographer Edward Steichen.
"High Fashion - The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937." (Until Jan 3.) More than 200 photographs from Steichen's fashion photography work for Vogue and Vanity Fair.
Actress Joan Bennett, 1928. Vogue cover, 1923.
MoMA celebrates "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity." (Until Jan. 25.)
Features more than 400 works reflecting the school's productions, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater design, painting, and sculpture, including works by Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Also see excerpt of New Yorker exhibit review. And Time on the impact of Bauhaus.
Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932.
IT'S GOD'S FAULT
Bad driver? Blame your genes. (Reuters)
House or workplace are cluttered? Blame your genes. (Reuters)
Ransom note's in here somewhere.
BOOM TO BUST
Bereaving Las Vegas, arguably N.A. hardest hit by housing-boom implosion. (Der Spiegel)
In slumping Dubai these days, one of four cheques bounces in real-estate collapse. (Times of London)
In glittering Dubai, $166 billion (U.S.) in planned real-estate development has been scrapped as property values plunged 41% in 1Q alone. Boom was built on debt and nosebleed oil prices. Global financial crisis and slumping wellhead prices put the brakes to that.
UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Why it makes no sense to lay off older workers. (Newsweek)
It's not fun being king. Being boss is hard on your health. (Reuters)
Why helicopters are so crash-prone. Hint: they do things we don't ask of planes. (Slate)
Why websites are so confusing. Notes on navigating cyberspace. (Harvard Business Review)
Fox News isn't just bad. It's un-American. (Jacob Weisberg, Slate/Newsweek)
Why Canada's falling behind in clean-tech R&D. (Financial Post)
How MSM get sucked into believing political rumours that spread like wildfire on the Web. (New Yorker)
Newspapers just look dead. (Canadian Journalism Report)
Why it's sane for Kim Jong-il to be crazy. (Reuters)
Write your own caption. Remember that Gordon Brown, whom I'd also rather not see in the buff, has nukes too.
DEBATES
A Catholic balks at a thoroughly anti-woman Church of Rome. (Maureen Dowd, New York Times)
Charles Lewis responds to Maureen Dowd's "Nazi slur" on Pope Benedict, et al. (National Post)
Will California become America's first "failed state"? (U.K. Guardian)
California is thriving, despite setbacks. (Time)
California: Failed state. (John Judis, New Republic, Sept. 5, 2005)
End state: Is California finished? (John Judis, New Republic, Oct. 26, 2009)
BETTER LIVING CENTRE
Are you getting enough dopamine? An update on the motivator molecule. (New York Times)
Smile, already. You're depressing the economy. (Slate)
Seven tips if you're chronically late. (Slate)
Best-buy vehicles of latest model year, in 13 categories, starting at $21,000. (Toronto Star)
Review of the latest wave of smartphones, including BlackBerry Storm 2.0. (New York Times)
In defense of fast food: One man's unapologetic love affair with Burger King, Taco Bell, et al. (Newsweek)
In defense of candy: Meet a man who lives almost entirely on sweets. (New York Times)
Paul Rudner of New York's West Village: no veggies allowed.
PROGRESS
USDA push to get farmers markets' fresh groceries closer to you. (National Public Radio)
How new high-speed trains are making China smaller. (Newsweek)
Climate-change progress: Toshiba's new mini-nuclear reactors. (Reuters)
Electric cars are a step closer. (Euronews)
Put your dog on a diet, save the planet. (Toronto Star)
Deal with it: Biotech foods might be a cure world hunger. (New York Times)
The recession killed off grandiose "celebrity architecture." Good. (New York Times)
Centennial of Burnham's "Chicago Plan" - every city should all have been so lucky. (New Yorker)
The Magnificent Mile, the "front lawn" on Lake Michigan, these things don't happen by accident. It's called urban planning and Chicago's Daniel Burnham was one of history's best.
GETAWAYS, NEAR AND FAR
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York, Nov. 10 only. (Carnegie Hall)
Montreal's Oliver Jones, consummate jazz pianist, at Glenn Gould Studio, Nov. 14 only. (GGS)
Gordon Lightfoot, Massey Hall, Toronto, Nov. 18, 19, 20.
"The Magic Flute," Opera de Montreal, Place des Arts de Montreal, Nov. 19 only.
Marvellous "Paul Gaugin, Paris 1889" show at Cleveland Museum of Art, Oct. 4-Jan. 18. (CMA)
Paul Gaugin, "Breton Girls Dancing, Pont Aven," 1888. On loan from National Gallery of Art, Washington.
MADE YOU LAUGH
Who knew the oboes have it in for the violas? (Shouts & Murmurs, New Yorker)
The man with but a surname takes a mate with no name at all. (Shouts & Murmers, New Yorker)
TV critic Matthew Gilbert's 14 most-annoying TV characters of all time. (Boston Globe)
She tops one reviewers' list of most annoying TV characters of all time.
The White House today released this portrait of the Obama family, taken in September in the Green Room of the Executive Mansion by Annie Leibovitz, long known for her portraiture for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Leibovitz has been mired in personal-finance difficulties this year. She did not, however, take a fee for her White House work, which one expects is extensive since she has been a frequent visitor at the White House in recent weeks.
At least one hopes there will be better shots than this. The lighting is superb, and the photographer has posed her subjects well. But the background is dreadful. Almost amateurish, the failure in composition. Sasha's head is competing with one of too many wall hangings in the shot; the colour of the room doesn't play well to this subject; and the background could hardly be more cluttered with doorways and other distractions - including that crazy urn on the fireplace mantel. There are five people in the shot, if you include the fellow holding up the aforementioned mantel, whom one takes to be Paul Revere or the mascot for Long John Silver's.
Remind me never to win an award - or do anything - of which Peggy Noonan disapproves.
The former Reagan speechwriter, who parlayed that long-ago job into a columnist post at the WSJ and a regular spot on Sunday morning talking-head TV, has gone, well, bonkers, over Obama's Nobel prize.
Bear in mind the president himself has said "I'm not sure I deserve this." He promptly announced he would donate the $1.4-million prize money, And he accepted the award "on behalf of America and its values" - not quite what the folks in Oslo had in mind, I am sure. For all that, looney right just can't get over the infamy of a fellow American deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I can't - I don't imagine anyone could - do justice to Noonan's cry for help, her completed application form for self-admission to a dry-out spa where her delusions can be gradually drawn out, possibly through leeching, and "processed," as they say in the Therapy World. Noonan, in a WSJ column headlined "A Wicked and Ignorant Award" (the overtly Catholic Noonan is a theocrat who frames public policy according to her moral worldview), seems to think the Oslo committee's selection is an attack on America, or at the very least a denigration of it:
For instance: The Peace Prize judges won't see it this way, but America has gone to Europe twice in the past century to fight for peace. This is an old concept, and has to do with killing killers so they can't kill anymore. It cost America a lot to do this, and we kept no territory, as they say, beyond the graves where our soldiers lie. America then taxed itself and gave its wealth not only to its allies but to its former adversaries, to help them rebuild. We didn't actually have to do this. We did it to make the world better. We did it to foster peace. (They should give us a prize.)
America hasn't just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.
Well, so were Nobel recipients Pearl S. Buck, Milton Friedman and Martin Luther King. Americans have dominated the Nobel economics and science prizes the way the NYT cornered the Pulitzer since that prize's inception. Americans took both Nobel's awarded in economics this year. So from whence comes this idea that the Nobel committees have it in for Americans?
America in the mid-20th-century fought in two theatres to protect America from the terrifying encroachment of fascism. The subsequent Marshall Plan was self-interested, a humanitarian imposition of American free-market values on a continent where communism was still widely potent. And a means of creating an economically and politically stable buffer between the U.S. and the emerging new U.S. enemy, the Soviet Union. It most definitely was not charity, something we "didn't actually have to do." The postwar U.S. policy of Soviet containment, as conceived by George F. Kennan and quickly adopted as U.S. policy for two generations, required it be done to protect America's national security and corporate interests.
That's the bizarre part of the column, dashed off by an American patriot who wears her parochialism on her sleeve but is ignorant of the recent history of her own homeland. Then Noonan's rant turns into a fact-checker's nightmare.
Many innovators share credit for electricity, going back to Ben Franklin. But the alternating currrent in Noonan's household - and by which the Norwegian judges read - was developed by Nikola Tesla, a Croatian. (Edison developed direct current, more dangerous and unsuitable in most non-industrial applications.)
The Internet was indeed a U.S. creation, tracing its roots to the Darpanet, developed by the Pentagon to enable scientists to exchange information among university computers worldwide. The Internet as we know it, however, is the World Wide Web. The Web made the information superhighway, as it was once quaintly known, useful to Noonan and billions of others by assigning an address to each of millions and then billions of Web pages. Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at the Swiss-based CERN labs, invented the Web.
Antibiotics were first identified by a Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, and the first antibiotic treatment by Alexander Fleming of Scotland, whose Adam Smith contributed mightily to the American ethic of raw capitalism. Shakespeare didn't set foot in the New World. The composition commonly known as the New World Symphony was written by a Czech. Commercial banking was perfected by Italians, investment banking by the Rothschilds. Television was invented in Russia, as was The Nutcracker and The Cherry Orchard. A Canadian invented standard time and the BlackBerry, The internal combustion engine, still in ubiquitous use worldwide, was invented in the 1880s by German's Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz independent of each other. The theory of relativity and modern psychoanalysis were pioneered by an ethnic German of Swiss nationality and an Austrian, respectively. A Spaniard gave us Don Quixote. The rocket propulsion systems behind the Apollo program orignated with the genius in rocketry of the Germans and Russians. The plastic hula hoop, an icon of 1950s America, was invented by an Australian, Alex Tolmer. One could go on.
Noonan, like Madonna, invented herself. I'll grant that.
TRENDS
Apple's new Tablet will reinvent personal computing. (Newsweek)
Early reviews on BlackBerry Storm 2 are positive, worthy rival to iPhone. (Christian Science Monitor)
New LRTs are suceeding in transit-hostile Phoenix, Denver and Salt Lake. (New Republic)
Time to stop knocking suburbia. It works. (Daily Telegraph)
HEALTH, FITNESS & RELATIONSHIPS
German men are the worst lovers, Spanish best, Canadians 10th-best, survey finds. (Daily Telegraph)
Words to use in that all-important first online dating response. (OKtrends.com)
It takes longer than the advertised 21 days to exchange a good for bad habit. Try 66 days. (Slate)
People more likely to wash their hands if they're shamed into it. (National Post)
When it comes to brain damage, football's no better than dogfighting. (Malcom Gladwell, New Yorker)
101 uses for a woman. (Times of London) #11. Their method of navigation ("No, the other left.")
101 uses for a man. (Times of London) #89. Watering the toilet seat. What is it, a plant? (1)
WORK & MONEY
More equal societies almost always fare better. (London Review of Books)
Study finds nasty bosses aren't evil, just insecure. Like you didn't know that. (Toronto Star)
Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase are meltdown's big winners. (NYT)
Calvin Trillin's argument: Wall Street, refuge for B students, crashed after the smarties arrived. (NYT)
Trillin a bit tongue-in-cheek, but some stats back him up. (Baseline Scenario)
Actually, blame falls on unorthodox "outsiders" crashing Street's old boy's club. (New Republic)
The "too big to fail" doctrine for errant banks is prohibitively costly. (UK Guardian)
The world's "crappiest" job. (Yangtze Evening Post)
A&E
Roman Polanski's art and abominable behaviour don't diminish each other. (Daily Telegraph)
Samuel Johnson was a sexist xenophobe who understood human nature. (Daily Telegraph)
In her latest novel, Atwood again revels in dystopia. (London Review of Books)
Aspiring authors had better be social-networking bloggers. (Shouts & Murmers, New Yorker)
Chinese read health and wealth self-help books - and that's about it. (Der Spiegel)
Bill Murray is world's best comic actor, says latest co-star, George Clooney (Times of London)
John Cleese on what made "Fawlty Towers" work. (Reuters)
Comic Sarah Silverman's "Sell the Vatican. Feed the world." a YouTube hit. (Globe and Mail) (video)
Hitchcock interview with Tom Snyder from 1973's "Tomorrow" resurfaces. (metafilter.com) (video)
The 50 best (worst?) movie villians. (Times of London) (2)
THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY
Black is back - ack! How unoriginal. And the lint... (New York Observer)
Why I dislike Lululemon more than ever. (FiredForNow.com)
The 50 most annoying things about the Internet. (Daily Telegraph)
Can you really tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his face? (Slate)
What poker teaches us about notables who've mastered the game. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
(1) I found this commenter a tad discouraging. "Karen Tips wrote: '#102. Digging in the garden. My late husband was a great hand at digging up planting beds, tilling, making big holes for shrubs, etc. That is what I miss most about him.'" I know how the English obsess over their gardens. But doesn't the time Ms. Tib's husband sang "I Remember You" when asking her hand in marriage at the Savoy trump messing about with dirt?
(2) Fewer things worse than a movie villain you can't work up a real hate for. Some of my favourites: Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man, Dennis Hopper in Speed, and the psychos in the first Dirty Harry and in Air Force One.
"Today, with the dollar weakening and the U.S.'s economic image tarnished, the dollar imagery looks funereal," says Kevin Kelleher, a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. "Are dead presidents and eyeballs floating above pyramids really the best we can do?"
On Slate's Big Money site, Kelleher showcases some of the 50 alternative designs that New York designer Richard Smith has received at www.DollarReDesign.com, Smith's grassroots campaign to makeover America's paper currency in a time of economic doldrums.
Today's U.S. currrency was last significantly changed in the 1920s, when it was trimmed in size by one-third and obscure statesmen were replaced by more familiar ones.
Designer Dean Potter of Anchorage offers a convincing rationale: "We're a culture, not a government."
Roderick Thompson's bright, fresh design.
Tomas Garcia Moreno's "In Rock We Trust" series.
Kyle Thompson honours European philosophers who influenced the Founding Fathers, including Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and even Niccolo Machiavelli.
Grace Poser highlights everyday Americans.
Christina DiMeo also marks cultural icons, in this case Billie Holiday.
Canadian-born Peter Le, graduate of the Parsons New School and now living in Beijing, is fascinated with the mysterious Masonic imagery on the current U.S. money, and decides to go full-blown with it, noting that George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and other U.S. presidents were freemasons. Gives me the willies, but I love the dynamic colours (and the owl, of course).
Matthew Schroeder appropriates the entire Great Lakes for the U.S, but that's okay. You're looking at one-fifth of the world's fresh-water supply. (Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake wholly inside U.S. territory.)
Michelle Haft celebrates America's vocations.
This elegant but striking Richard Smith series symbolizes to me a 21st-century America shorn of iconography associated with the nation's imperialist past, open to new thinking and global ideas.
Gus promises with this last series out of the way, we can return to leading economic indicators, political and corporate strategems, and speculation on what Conrad Black had for lunch today. Of course, he's said that before, after the microcar series...
Dreary Soviet-era apartment blocks take on cheerful facades...
And this Lego V-8 engine actually works. Only 31 rpm, mind you, but still...
Take your time with this one.
LUXE LIFE | Chinese luxury-goods spending defies global economic malaise. Western luxe peddlers like Gucci flocking to Shanghai, aleady are doing surprisingly well. They will reap even greater returns as China's nascent consumer economy - now a fraction of America's - begins to develop in China's huge interior cities far from coastal Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Opening day at Gucci's flagship Shanghai store in June.
WELL-TIMED FOR 'RUN FOR THE CURE' | Canadian researchers report breast cancer breakthrough. Treatment soon will be more easily be "customized" to patients, improving odds of successful outcomes. "This is a watershed event in our ability to understand the causes of breast cancer and to develop personalized medicines for our patients," Dr. Samuel Aparicio, head of the breast cancer research program at the British Columbia Cancer Agency, who worked on the study, said in a statement. The research was largely funded by the B.C. Cancer Foundation's annual Weekend to End Breast Cancer walk and similar events across the country.
DESERVED GOOD HUMOUR: Researchers Sam Aparicio, right, and Marco Marra yesterday at a Vancouver presentation of their breakthrough breast cancer findings.
KUDOS FOR CANUCK ACADEME | McGill, U of T and University of Alberta gain in world rankings. McGill retains its hold on "top public campus in N.A." in Britain's Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. If it's a "knowledge economy" that's to define prosperity in the 21st century, more proof Canada has the right stuff to thrive, with sufficient public- and private-sector support.
NO KINDLE FOR CANADA | Great White North excluded as Kindle rolled out in about 100 nations. Globe can't unravel mystery, but notes irritating phenomenon: "For Canadian consumers, it's yet another in a long line of annoying delays and prohibitions – from smartphones that take years to go on sale to online gift cards that are bound by mysterious legal restrictions to Internet video that won't play once it recognizes the user isn't in a particular country."
YET ANOTHER IGGY FLIP FLOP | Grit leader appoints Marc Garneau as new Quebec lieutenant. Replacement for Coderre is admirably swift, but comes only after Iggy told us there would be no new Quebec chief, ending a Grit tradition that has served the "natural governing party" well since Confederation. Worse, in transparent bid to obscure volte face, Iggy insists Garneau is not "lieutenant" but "Quebec representative." Last we looked, Grits had several Quebec representatives. They're called MPs and riding presidents. Globe's eer fair-minded Lawrence Martin reminds us Chretien and other rookie Opposition Leaders were similarly gaffe-prone yet prevailed. A sound argument, until the words Stephane Dion enter the conversation.
Iggy talks to reporters yesterday, flanked by MPs Marc Garneau and Pablo Rodriguez.
GLOBE-TROTTING HOGTOWNERS | Toronto-based Brookfield invests $1.1 billion in Aussie land deal. Already landlord of Lower Manattan's skyline-defining World Financial Center, Brookfield now major player in commercial property Down Under.
GREEN SHOOTS | Industrial products bellwether Alcoa reports surprising profit upturn. Its tourism and business-travel counterpart, Marriott, beats profit estimates. Alcatel-Lucent, victim of same telco-equipment downturn that killed Nortel, has been profitless since its creation by merger three years ago. But its shares are up 80% this year, on speculation of overdue recovery in global telco spending.
CANWEST PAPERS SPIN-OFF? | Papers might be spun off in IPO as early as next year. Troubled CanWest's market-dominant papers are healthy enough given the worst advertising drought since the Depression. If they can be liberated from insolvent CanWest's corporate debt of $4 billion, they stand a good chance of thriving. My hope remains that eventually the chain will be broken up, with separate ownership for individual papers or regional groups (say, new owners for each of Lower Mainland's Vancouver Sun and Province; Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal; Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon StarPhoenix), to expand number of newspaper owners and to return ownership to local or regional roots. More owners means more and differing ideas on confronting Web challenge, and an end to chains' stultifying absentee ownership.
ARTS HONOURS | Herta Mueller, wins 2009 Nobel prize for literature. Romanian-born German author who documented horrors of totalitarianism in Cold War Romania is recogonized for her ability to depict "the landscape of the dispossed." Barbra Streisand, top-selling female vocalist of all time, sees her recent, Diana Krall-produced CD, "Love is the Answer," become her ninth pop-chart-topping album. Gratifying for first-time producer Krall. And for Steisand, in breaking from her heavily orchestrated style, opting instead for spare arrangements that are a return to the Brooklyn native's intimate nightclub years. (So marks Gus's first audio pick.)
IRVING PENN (1917-2009) | Pioneering fashion photographer dies at 92. As longtime cover photographer for Vogue, Penn's elegant portraiture had enormous influence on contemporaries and subsequent generations of high-fashion interpreters.
MEN ARE FROM PLUTO | New book offers guidance to women on talking with men, especially at office. Code Switching: How to Talk So Men Will Listen (Alpha Books) is co-authored by Claire Damken Brown, a veteran of the corporate world (AT&T and Lucent Technologies) and Audrey Nelson, a communications consultant. Gender differences abound, Reuters reports in review of book: "Women apologize more than men, play the role of 'office mom' to whom everyone confides, and offer more subjective opinions. Men tell more jokes, but women laugh at them more. Men want solutions to problems while women look for understanding of problems, and men like to play devil's advocate while women want to help everyone to agree, the authors say. Even in e-mails, men banter and write short to-the-point messages, while women share personal information and express appreciation and support in longer messages, they say." Not too much here to advance Deborah Tannen's work, but updated observations are sound and need repeating .
QUOTE OF THE DAY | "I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed." -Bette Davis (Dark Victory; Now, Voyager; All About Eve.)
Courtesy Tony Auth, Philadelphia Inquirer.
Canada heading into fourth election in six years, with no good reason. Spate of minority governments in the 1960s, too, but that was the period of Medicare, CPP and QPP's creation, bilingualism and multiculturalism policies and a new Canadian flag - still the foundation of modern, pluralistic Canada. This time, argues Globe's John Ibbitson, it's just a game of chicken serving only partisan interests will genuine issues go undebated.
Preparing for new parliamentary session. Commons members return today from summer break.
EU makes threatening noises about Berlin's bailout of Opel in Magna deal. And a trustee of Germany's stake in Opel frets that Opel's technology, funded by Berlin, will get shipped to Russia. As I wrote here, I don't think Magna's deal is anywhere near happening, despite last week's hoopla.
Four reasons Ford might just be the automaker of the future.
Silicon Valley worries, with good reason, neither it nor the U.S. will emerge as powerhouse of 21st-century clean-energy revolution. China already has a lead in solar panels; India also coming up fast in alternative energy development. Much nascent activity in Canada, too, but lacks government push.
Google's high-level defections becoming too numerous to ignore. Has Google lost its mojo a growth company, faster than the Microsoft did by the mid-1990s?
Obama to use Lehman-collapse anniversary for speech today on need for advanced financial-market regulations. NYT business columnist Gretchen Morgenson on continued lack of accountability for Wall Street regulators. Plus ca change.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-laureate economist, urges end to fetish with GDP as chief indicator of economic health - a notion Obama first gave voice to months ago. Also warns that Wall Street banks in no better shape now than Lehman Brothers' collapse a year ago tomorrow.
American Airlines said to seek tie-up with JAL, another sign of industry consolidation that began with successful integration of Air France and KLM, now world's biggest airline.
IKEA's persistent and intermittently successful battle against Russian corrupution.
Michelangelo's Florence agog at huge new American statue, 'marvelous' to some observers, 'monstrous' to others. New York sculptor Greg Wyatt, 59, intends "Two Rivers" - the first new monumental work to appear in the fabled Piazza della Signoria in five centuries - as symbolic of the ties between peoples of the Arno and Hudson rivers. Florentines famously passionate about public art pieces; appearance of Michelangelo's "David" in 1505 ignited storm of controversy - same kind of debate the largely Florence-financed Wyatt piece is intended to generate. Wyatt's only worry is that the piazza might crack under the weight of his 11-ton, 18-foot-tall bronze statue.
American sculptor Greg Wyatt's enormous "Two Rivers" in a Paris studio in August. The enormous bronze statue has since been erected in Florence's renowned Piazza della Signoria.
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Quote of the day
"Never work with an Oscar winner who is shorter than the statue." -Larry Gelbart (1928-2009), U.S. screenwriter (A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, "M*A*S*H*," Tootsie, Oh, God!, Barbarians at the Gate), after a falling out with Tootsie star Dustin Hoffman.
David Olive is a business and current affairs columnist at the Star, which he joined in 2001 after stints at the Globe and Mail, National Post and Financial Post.
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
- George Bernard Shaw
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