Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. issued a Nov. 14 memo to the staff, which was supposed to sooth the fretful, but reading it is like wading through a field of wheat paste. I don't even work at the Post, and I wanted to commit suicide after I trudged through its final, gloomy paragraph.

The Post exodus: what it means for political journalism. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Making so much money so quickly seems impossible. But let me show you how Hertz's owners can quadruple their investment even though the Street values the company at only about 25 percent more than they paid for it. It's all about borrowing lots of money while taking your own money off the table. Ready for the ride? Fasten your seat belt.
The three firms' clients paid $14.9 billion for Hertz last December. But they invested only about $2.3 billion of their own cash, with Hertz taking on $12.6 billion in debt. If Hertz sells stock in the IPO at $17 a share -- the middle of the projected price range -- the company would be valued at $18.4 billion: $12.9 billion in debt, plus stock valued at $5.5 billion.
On the surface, this doesn't produce anything like the profits I've talked about. But watch. As part of the wheeling and dealing, Hertz's owners are paying themselves about $1.4 billion in cash dividends. (There's been a fuss in the press over these payments, but I'm not taking a stand on them -- I'm just counting money.) Subtract that from the $2.3 billion initial investment, and they've got only about $900 million invested. At $17 a share, their Hertz stock will be valued at $3.9 billion -- producing a $3 billion pre-fee paper profit.

Allan Sloan - Hertz on the Street - washingtonpost.com

If ever there was an antithesis to Leibovitz's airbrushed glamour shots, the images of Sontag are it, made during the last few days of her illness, and finally, after her death. Swollen and scarred, lying prostrate in her bed, Sontag suffers mightily in front of Leibovitz's lens, a reality that is especially hard to reconcile when one remembers how preening and proud Sontag could be in life.

Annie Leibovitz's reckless candor | Salon Arts & Entertainment

Determining whether or not someone's constitutional rights have been violated is not an act of "judicial activism." Rather, it's the very reason we have a court system.

The Anonymous Liberal: Gay Marriage: A Case of Conclusions Needing to Catch Up With Premises

If Michael J. Fox could still act he would be making millions of dollars acting in paying TV commercials, films or sitcoms. He's only 45 years old for God's sake and he still has young kids. He is suffering from a horrifying disease and he deserves for people to respect his sincerity if nothing else. He does actually have Parkinson's, after all, and I'm sure he really does believe that stem cell research provides a hope for a cure --- unless they think he's lying about that too. I was never an avid fan of The Today Show but I never knew that Matt Lauer shared the same privileged, cynical sophomoric worldview as the talk show pig, Rush Limbaugh. Now I know. I won't be bothering with him anymore."

Salon.com - Daou Report

Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers. She's the privileged little girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory whose father, a nut tycoon, makes sure his daughter wins a golden ticket to the Willie Wonka factory by buying up countless Wonka bars, which his workers methodically unwrap till they find the prize. If Coppola's 2004 Academy Award for best original screenplay for Lost in Translation was her golden ticket to big-budget filmmaking, Marie Antoinette is her prize, a $40 million tour through the lush and hallucinatory candy land of 18th-century France. Of course, Roald Dahl's insufferable Veruca Salt was eventually seized by angry squirrels and hurled down a garbage chute. Will Coppola suffer a similar fate when Marie Antoinette opens this Friday?

Marie Antoinette reviewed. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

SKOKIE, Ill. - As the Great Chicago Fire was ravaging the city in 1871, William Rand and Andrew McNally saved their business by burying two printing machines on the sandy Lake Michigan shore.

No such clear-cut solution emerged to preserve Rand McNally & Co.'s dominance more than a century later, when the mapmaker lost its way in the age of the Internet.

Mapmaker Rand McNally turns 150 - Yahoo! News

it is to the actual American idiom, past or present, roughly what the Rainforest Caf頩s to the Amazon basin.

The disgracefulness of Charles Frazier. By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine

"I've had a lot of interviews where people come in and they go, 'Well, I was expecting to hate this movie,' " he says, with a tone of incredulity. "Why were you expecting to hate a movie? I don't pick up a book expecting to not like it. I pick up a book expecting -- hoping -- it'll change my life. It seems a weird thing, that if you like something very much, you can't like something else as well. It's like you're only allowed 10 good things, and you have to lose one every time something good comes into your life."

Jones: Small Shoes to Fill In the Other Truman Show - washingtonpost.com

Cook is more like the harmlessly affected guy who lives in the dorm room next door, the one obsessed with UFO abduction, killer-bee attacks, sexual humiliation, clubbing, hot chicks, and the other predilections of youth. (He's like the guy who's always trying to show you something he found on the Internet.) Cook's jokes often begin with "this is what everybody does when …"; he's a generalizer rather than an advocate of a particular (or particularly crude) worldview.

Dane Cook: insert punch line. By Bryan Curtis - Slate Magazine