Frank Greve:

Car reviewing was great fun back in the '70s when Car and Driver, then based in Manhattan, sometimes did late night acceleration tests on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the lads from Motor Trend wound for days through the South of France in spring at carmakers' expense. About all that's left of that era is the prose. Specifically the kind of over-the-top prose that founding father Tom McCahill of Mechanix Illustrated, a slumming Yalie, offered up when he declared the 1957 Pontiac's ride "smooth as a prom queen's thigh." Lawrence Ulrich approached McCahill's high bar last fall in a New York Times review when he likened driving the Ferrari 458 Italia to "barreling Woody Allen's Orgasmatron over Niagara Falls." And the Wall Street Journal's Neil, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2004 while writing about cars for the Los Angeles Times, sailed high over the bar last fall when he compared the joy of accelerating an especially muscular Mercedes-Benz, the CL63 AMG, to "being fired from a Roman catapult into a mattress of cocaine."

Witold Rybczynski:

In Washington, we've come to see the bizarre phenomenon that one federal official characterized to me as "bollard envy," where the degree of protection becomes a symbol of bureaucratic status, like a choice parking spot or a corner office. Perhaps the most egregious example is the screening center for visitors that Congress built for itself; by the time the underground facility was finished it covered half a million square feet and cost $620 million.

Lapham's Quarterly:

The G8 met in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008 to address the global food crisis. Over an eighteen-course meal -- including truffles, caviar, conger eel, Kyoto beef, and champagne -- prepared by sixty chefs, the world leaders came to a consensus: "We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security."