I'm compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn't. Still, it might, any second now.
I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe's second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him.
Why has the pace of fundamental innovation in military technologies slowed? Why, six years after 9/11, is there no mega-research project -- along the lines of the crash Manhattan Project that 62 years ago produced the first atomic bombs -- to address the plausible security threats to the United States in the 21st century? These two questions say a lot about how innovation happens today, and why concerns about national security, which once motivated civilian scientists and engineers to make crucial contributions to military technologies, may again shape innovation priorities.
"Do these discoveries blow people's minds? Yes."
"What matters is who is in the know in the Washington crowd."
These are people who, whether pegged as nerds or rebels or plodders, have taken control of the stories that form their identities.
"Some of our folks went to Washington to dry the swamp and made partnership with the alligators," he said.
They urged the district to move beyond what they said was a preoccupation with social engineering ...
In the United States, Mr. Chertoff held so-called principals meetings.
As he described the practice, one of his assistants shook his head no and politely corrected his boss. Finally, the director confessed, "I don't know what we do."
I think America needs a whole lot more persuading and a lot less bossing.
Mr. Blair's greatest talent is his ability to persuade, shame and wheedle people into doing things they would just as soon not do.
Many of us think of invention or innovation as a wholly conceived, brand-new, big-leap-forward creation unlike anything that has preceded it. But much of mechanical success involves fiddling with the inherent conflicts within a device until you find a tiny interstice among the countervailing forces, that sweet spot, where the device suddenly does what you want it to do.
An established tool of student empowerment in American higher education, student evaluations are a staple in all classes at the end of each semester. A journalist-professor friend who is less than enamored of teaching caustically refers to them as "customer service." Translation: He has been burned by his students. But his larger meaning is that higher education, like American society in general, is increasingly market-driven, and by his jaded reckoning a student and his parents are not markedly different from Harry the Striving Suburbanite roaming the aisles of Home Depot.
In an ironic twist for Stanley's company, which purports to remove libelous statements from the Internet, Wake ruled: 'Stanley committed the tort of libel by publishing online false statements that the attorneys at Jaburg & Wilk are 'partners in slime' and that Speth is an 'unethical attorney,' an 'Internet extortionist,' and a 'partner in the ripoff report extortion scam.' The statements were published in at least reckless disregard of their falsity."
Viewers are asked to vote on which is worst: the Spanish-language commercial sponsored by the California Milk Processor Board featuring " Amazon goddesses," doing amazing things with their hair because milk makes it strong and healthy; the spot suggesting that Yoplait yogurt helps women look trim in teeny-weenie bikinis; or the commercial that characterizes Nesquik from Nestle as a health food for children.
Homer, who is 45, is a strikingly handsome guy -- John Edwards handsome.
"We continue to vigorously deny any allegations," said a spokeswoman for the Man Group.
They seemed long past entertaining any notion that what they were doing was inconsequential or frivolous.
Justice Breyer's highly unusual declaration from the bench on Thursday: "It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much."
Maybe it's the lederhosen and the alpenhorns. Maybe it's just a bit too, well, German for anyone else.
Young audiences, he suggested, "just want more fun in electronic music, more hedonism."
This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left versus right; it is a question of right versus wrong.
I thought about all of this, and then I thought of something that shook me: I might be wrong.
"It'd be like picking a fight with a rich grandmother."
"I guess it's fun. But it's not my kind of fun."
"The first response is 'Huh?' and the second response is 'Far out.' "
Trying to interfere with disease by blocking a single point can be like trying to keep traffic from reaching downtown Manhattan by closing a single intersection.
There is nothing scientists enjoy more than the prospect of a good paradigm shift.
Is Darwin due for an upgrade?
Where do you think we get most of the imported fireworks that we use as an expression of our independent American identity? From China.
It isn't just on the lower frequencies, late at night, where people are waiting on the Mayan apocalypse.
Loyalists are the American Revolution's guilty secret: rarely spoken of, hauntingly present.
We celebrate loners and visionaries, but we tend to do so only after the fact, when the class nerd who sat by himself in the lunchroom ends up writing a best-selling software program.
Although this elitist stampede is decried by one and all as being antithetical to the recognition of real talent and to democratic values as a whole, it is nonetheless almost uniformly embraced.
One of the issues we're increasingly concerned about is the movement of Europeans ...
Worst of all, the phone occasionally forces you to make actual plans with the people you talk to -- to suggest lunch or dinner -- even if you have no desire whatsoever to see them.
"The IT Crowd," a workplace comedy for NBC about a company's computer technology geek squad.
... far more danceable than the Cross Bronx Expressway at rush hour ...
Three things turn out to increase the risk of conflict: a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men; an imbalance between ethnic groups, with one tending to outnumber the rest; and a supply of natural resources like diamonds or oil, which simultaneously encourages and helps to finance rebellion.
Why the American need for tears? Ms. Pearl asks.
It's the movie's insistence that politics are integrated into the warp and woof of life, rather than something you wear like a campaign button, which gives pause.
Can there be such a thing as selfless swagger?
The generation that fought the Revolution was not simply interested in creating a republic. From the beginning, many American patriots were out to build an empire.
These days, new can seem so yesterday. What matters is what's next.
For anyone who cares about music and its current chaotic state, the summer of 1997 was the start of the last golden era of pop (if not its final one) and, more important, the beginning of the end of the music business as we knew it.
"I think that there will be a King Canute quality to the decision," Professor Strauss said, referring to the Anglo-Saxon king who ordered the sea's waves to stop.
At times, adult life can feel like an extended exercise in escaping high school.
It was 45 years ago. But it seems like yesterday. And it is.
She is highly visible, speaks often and yet is strangely enigmatic.
I'm imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.
He did things that an actor of his caliber normally would not do, like eating maggots or catching a live snake. You just name it. It's unbelievable.
"As a hedge fund manager, you just might be deciding whether you want to golf or scuba-dive more."
Perhaps the neoconservatives believe that we can only be defined by having an enemy.
It's clearly a, it's kind of a, of a directive that ... [to] avoid getting involved, you or your office getting involved ... [unclear] I can do under the law -- there's nothing wrong [with it] -- By the National Security Act, I'm charged with [unclear].
More than anything, the papers provide a dark history of the climate both at the CIA and in Washington during the cold war and the Vietnam era, when fears about the Soviet threat created a no-holds-barred culture at the spy agency.
"After 9/11, the gloves come off." -COFER BLACK, former director, CIA Counterterrorism Center
"If you sit down with a list of the details of what I do, you wouldn't come up with very much," she said cheerfully. "I have a new house. I have kids. I have boxes to unpack. I have cancer."
Google now makes far more money in one quarter than Yahoo does in a year.
The kitsch is also a key to something.
"I'm everyone's guinea pig," said Christopher Kokinos.
Think of your task as akin to that of a hired mourner at a funeral in Europe in the Middle Ages or in ancient Greece -- as a performance, the honorable work of a skilled professional, not a manifestation of personal faith.
... a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film.
Although the actors are wooden, they're also gorgeous.
"One of these guys needs a smaller hole," one gravedigger said, laughing.
"This may blow up in our face, but it's not going to be for lack of effort."
"This is going to bring me to my knees," said Deb Maguire.
"I guess I didn't need to get in line ..."
"Ultimately we are going to have to explain to people that this is an obligation, that it is not optional."
Alongside the usual range of reactions -- disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience -- a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event's significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it.
Many users of social networks explored only parts of the sites that were of interest of them.
Xianz.com bills itself as a 'Faith-Based MySpace.' "Xianz is like a big church!" says Caitlin.
A "three-way conversation" among bloggers, readers and marketers ...
"AT&T is interested in anything that drives more bandwidth requirements."
"It's almost like you're giving the label a vending machine."
Now, venture capitalists say companies need to have at least $100 million in annual revenue, positive cash flow and a clear path to profitability.
Bell Canada, in the largest leveraged buyout ever ...
Vigilance underpins quite a lot of behavior in Britain these days.
On June 23, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan accused the United States military and its NATO allies of carrying out "careless operations."
Asking them to reread history with charitable eyes, that won't be easy.
He portrayed the Russian plan as polite acquiescence with the overheated and questionable fears the United States has expressed ...
"We imagine that the Russians and the Chinese are going to play slowball here."
"The ring tones are reflective of the issues that young people care about."
Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger Americans have historically been more likely than the population as a whole to be supportive of what a president is doing in a time of war.
The now legendary story of her Freudian slip at a Washington dinner party when she referred to the president as "my husb-" has stuck partly because it seems to convey some emotional truth.
It is a musical undertaking on a vast scale and one that has brought oddly harmonious marriages among the worlds of art and government, music and engineering.
The nation has not elected an unmarried president since the 19th century.
Bloomberg's unwillingness to engage in the symbolic acts many constituents find meaningful ...
He frequently indulges a louche sense of humor, joking at a dinner one night that if Salma Hayek joined him at the official mayor's residence, he might actually live there.
Speculation can run rampant like water finding its own level; the facts form a bulwark against harmful fiction.
"There are usually a few people who get their hands on a book and get some rush in spoiling the details for us. They get some sick satisfaction that they’re sticking it to the man."
"It's becoming ever more clear that Rudy Giuliani suffers from John Kerry syndrome."
