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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market," wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, which eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.
"Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech," said Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. "We don't subscribe to a marketplace of ideas."
"Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world."
Senator Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night, prevailing through an epic battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in a primary campaign that inspired millions of voters from every corner of America to demand change in Washington.
This is a great presentation on the housing bubble and the current economic disaster. The bottom line is:
I strongly recommend you not buy a house right now. Instead, rent a place, put your feet up, open a bag of chips, and watch the housing market crash. We’re not going to bounce at the bottom, we’ll stay there a while, so it’s not something you’ll miss.
From the archive:
The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitiztion, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.
That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.
Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective.
America's educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
In teaching students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science's underlying technical details.
Here's the set-up: one stick figure says to another, “Make me a sandwich,” only to be told, “No.” Thinking quickly, stick figure No. 1 says, “Sudo make me a sandwich,” and the once-recalcitrant stick figure No. 2 must comply.
