There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Anthony Minghella, 54, Director, Dies
Topic: Movies
11:14 pm EDT, Mar 19, 2008
Anthony Minghella, the British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of “The English Patient,” died Tuesday morning in London. He was 54.
Mr. Minghella’s films, which also included “Breaking and Entering” (2006), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) and “Cold Mountain” (2003), used a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore ways in which the dynamics of class often pushed people into corners that they had to fight or scheme their way out of.
"So many of the decisions at these companies are not about the music. They are shortsighted and desperate. For so long, the record industry had control. But now that monopoly has ended, they don't know what to do."
Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.
The defendants were college buddies who hatched a plan to steal rare books from the special collections library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and sell them at auction in New York City. In July 2004, after months of idle discussion, these four men decided in earnest to carry out the robbery, which led to months of research (about rare books, auction houses, Swiss Bank accounts, etc.), brainstorming, and planning. Each of the four took on separate responsibilities: Warren Lipka created aliases ("Walter Beckman"), set up email accounts, and contacted the library and various auction houses. Spencer Reinhard created disguises, drew floor plans and maps, and created false documents. Eric Borsuk and Chaz Allen staked out the library, planned the getaway, and purchased snacks for the trip.
(Hat tip to Harper's for the title; I also recommend their edit of the decision, which is shorter and more dramatic, but alas, not (yet) freely available)
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly.
Secret session 'was a total waste of time', says Congressman
Topic: Surveillance
10:51 am EDT, Mar 15, 2008
James T. Walsh was one Republican who questioned the value of the session. “What we heard was marginally classified,” he said. “The really secret stuff, we couldn’t talk about.”
“We saved him,” one said. “He probably would have been disciplined.”
From the headlines:
They discussed his reputation as a "difficult" man who sometimes asked "to do things you might not think were safe."
But more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.
To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.
On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.
Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.
A few from the archive:
Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"
Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.
Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.
In the Internet era, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.
