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.

Prompted by a comment from Decius about No Country and catch phrases ...

"The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure."

You can't talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don't have the senses to feel it with."

News reports in February revealed that officials at a West Texas youth prison had been accused of sexually abusing inmates. The revelations that followed included reports of youth beatings, lax medical care and a culture of retaliation against whistle-blowers.

"My name is Shinseki, and I am a soldier," he said, poking fun at his reputation for spartan public statements.

Legislation passed in May was supposed to address the problems. To some extent it did, according to one lawmaker.

"We probably don't have management raping kids now," said state Rep. Jerry Madden.

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul -- perhaps permanently -- in response to fears that they could be attacked by Afghans angered by the film's culturally inflammatory rape scene.

These were dark movies -- the feel-bad films of the year -- conjured up in what movie people seem to collectively sense as grave times, hatched in producers' offices and on writers' laptops not long after the 2004 election and amid increasing setbacks in the Iraq war and gloomy environmental warnings. Some of the filmmakers and actors wore orange ribbons or rubber bracelets to protest alleged incidents of torture by the United States at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the subject of "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won Best Documentary Feature.

When not offering a surfeit of death and gloom, Academy nominees this year focused, in at least some metaphorical way, on all the looming issues:

Lovers died in a time of war; the thirst for oil took precedence over humanity; greedy corporate types stooped lower than low; a killer roamed the desolate US-Mexican border... [ Read More (1.1k in body) ]

There's no denying that we're in thrall to the purveyors of low-hanging fruit; to overcome our intertwined ignorance, we must ask hard questions about man-tiger conflict.

There is no denying that for some middle-class Americans, the past few years have indeed been a struggle. What is missing from Mr Obama's speeches is any hint that this is not the whole story: that globalisation brings down prices and increases consumer choice; that unemployment is low by historical standards; that American companies are still the world's most dynamic and creative; and that Americans still, on the whole, live lives of astonishing affluence.

Above all, he says: "Don't be afraid to ask hard questions when you find something funny."

There is no denying that the security situation has deteriorated in the past year.

In a New York Times/CBS News telephone poll conducted Feb. 20-24 and released Tuesday, nearly half of those respondents who described themselves as voters in Democratic primaries or caucuses said the news media had been “harder” on Mrs. Clinton than other candidates. (Only about 1 in 10 suggested the news media had been harder on Mr. Obama.)

There is no denying that it is arguably the most attractive notebook computer currently in the market and there is also no denying that appearance is incredibly important to a large portion of the buying audience.

I fill the gaps by fulminating about French movies. When I finally stop, the second-most-beautiful woman in the room reveals she is French and asks me awfully hard questions.

There is no denying that the South African fashion industry is gaining in strength.

As efforts are made to reduce man-tiger conflict, another threat is looming over the horizon, the threat of global warming.

Like Mrs Clinton (who calls for a “time-out” on trade deals, whatever that may mean), he is maddeningly vague.

The ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

“While I was working on the book,” Mr. Selznick said, “there were people who said, ‘You’re doing a book about French silent movies and clocks for kids? That sounds like a very bad idea.’ ”

“The Taliban came in two vehicles,” Mr. Sherpao said. “They said to the intelligence officer, ‘Are you so and so?’ When he said ‘Yes,’ they shot him dead.”

For all its power, the Fed cannot change this troubling fact: trust in much of the financial system -- banks, brokerage houses, ratings agencies, bond insurers, regulators -- has been severely damaged by the subprime mortgage crisis. And that damage cannot be reversed with a quick cut in interest rates.

The Fed cannot turn a bad mortgage loan into a good one.

In other words, it is likely to take many more months to plumb this well of losses. And it will far exceed the $150 billion federal stimulus plan being hashed out in Washington.

Just as surely as the SUV will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

We are living in a post-bubble world, following the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. That is the backdrop for the current crisis. We need to restore confidence in the markets’ basic ability to function, not in their presumed tendency to make us all rich by always going up.

People who are extremely color-conscious will have to wait another few years before they can happily leave incandescents.

It would take manufacturers about one year to produce a billion doses of any vaccine based on a new pandemic strain. But the pandemic would have circled the globe within three months.

“Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together.”

The problem with all these neo-Lovecraft jobs, though, is that even when they’re as impressively peculiar as Laird Barron’s, they feel secondhand, pointless, helplessly de trop.

... bitter ... change ... infused ... contest ... plunges ... vowed ... cynics ... illusion ... euphoric ... demonize ... change ... capture ... base ... spoiler ... interwoven ... swayed in the cool breeze ... vigorously ... hampering ... female support ... vigorous sniping ... a mere manager ... heading into the crush ... lay to rest any doubts ... change ... a pathway to citizenship ... detoured from straight talk ... change ... decidedly gentle sparring ... able fiscal stewards ... bland, fairly polite ... all lulled into a very false sense of security ... the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race ... touchy-feely ... relatively brainy ... change ... elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins ... it is the females who are the born politicians ... occasional displays of populist umbrage ... change ... making friendly overtures ... nothing more than costly malarky ... change agent ... flamboyant self-importance ... ingratiatingly twee ...

The metropolis it depicts is one in which money is the measure of all value, and in which every human relationship can be reduced to a transaction, a deal.

To gain control over runaway costs, the movie industry is increasingly striving for a one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to the types of films it churns out and the megawatt marketing campaigns that accompany them. But while the studios once tailored their product to the tastes of American audiences and tweaked it for the international crowd, the reverse is becoming the norm.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure. Happily, however, 27 percent read 15 or more books.

American officials said the visit was prompted by an increasing sense of urgency at the highest levels of the United States government that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts to destabilize the Pakistani government.

The citizens like Ms. Yang who marched on People’s Square are wary of calling their event and the antitrain movement a protest. Most even shy from the word “march,” preferring to speak instead of a “collective walk” to the square.

“A wonderful example of what some observers of politics call ‘inside-outside’ -- when the protester works with those in authority who are sympathetic, behind the scenes, to achieve the desired goal and where those in authority, who are sympathetic, work with the protester on tactics that they believe would be helpful to the cause.”

What accounts for this need to pay public tribute?

In most cases, Mr. Sherpao said, the police have had a boilerplate approach to solving the suicide bombings. They have blamed them on Baitullah Mehsud.

Maybe the best story in this superb collection is a rapt little piece called “Skeeter Junkie,” in which a young heroin addict first begins to enjoy the feeling of the mosquito feeding on his arm, then starts to identify with it and then, as the drugs ooze through his veins, somehow becomes it and finally uses the “exquisite” flying bloodsucker to transport him to the apartment of his comely but standoffish downstairs neighbor. It’s a horror story, I guess, but it’s also funny, weirdly erotic and, in a way that horror almost never is, tragic.

Star suicides shock us, raising the question of whether celebrities, underneath all their glamorous trappings, are just as miserable and depressed as everyone else.

In a country that declares happiness to be a constitutional right, it is unclear whether therapy -- a process that mostly offers a means of arranging rather than altering experience -- provides enough bang for the buck.

Performers thrive on attention, and sometimes admit that it’s an addiction; now, the Internet enables that addiction all too easily. The unintended consequence is that we can now watch stars self-destruct in real time.

“There’s definitely a winter malaise setting in. The fun group dynamic that we had the first week or two has dissolved. It’s tough to see any kind of hope on the horizon.”

Caroline Kennedy: Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible. We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama.

The crowds that turn out for Mr. Giuliani seem adoring enough. He drew more than 200 at the Columbia Restaurant here Saturday morning. But when he asked how many had voted early -- which his campaign has been pressing its supporters to do for two weeks -- only a few hands went up.

“Suddenly you win Iowa, and the knives come out."

All game shows are by definition mercenary, but producers go to great lengths to try to dress up contestants’ cupidity as altruism.

"Just because you didn’t find every Easter egg didn’t mean that it wasn’t planted."

While Mr. Romney, a former business executive and governor of Massachusetts, has reveled in the shift in attention to the economy in the contest, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, has sought to remind voters about the continuing threat of Islamic extremism and his national security credentials.

In a Nakuru neighborhood called Free Area, hundreds of Kikuyu men burned down homes and businesses belonging to Luos, Mr. Odinga’s ethnic group. The Luos who refused to leave were badly beaten, and sometimes worse. According to witnesses, a Kikuyu mob forcibly circumcised one Luo man who later bled to death. Many people in Free Area, which is now almost totally Kikuyu, say it will be difficult to make peace.

The weakness of the Pakistani police and the army response to determined and religiously motivated Taliban fighters was allowing the insurgency to get stronger day by day, he said. “The police are scared,” Mr. Sherpao said. “They don’t want to get involved.”

In the North-West Frontier Province, there was a risk of “total Talibanization,” he said.

Judge Kornmann cautioned the jury that nobody got “a free pass to shoot somebody” because they “went to Iraq or Afghanistan or the moon.”

American officials contend that now, more than ever, he recognizes the need to step up the battle against extremists who are seeking to topple his government. But he also believes that if American forces are discovered operating in Pakistan, the backlash will be more than he can control, especially because the Taliban and Al Qaeda are trying to cast him as a pawn of Washington.

The ease with which Mr. Maheras and Mr. Kim have put themselves back in play is a reminder that for many top Wall Street executives, humiliation and defeat need not result in a professional exile.