We The Creators of this site, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish Fantasy Congress for the United States of America.

In this game, we give you the power to draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. Enjoy our gift to you, o great nation: the power to play politics!™

NYT coverage here.

For those who have no idea how many yards Peyton Manning threw for on Sunday but can cite every legislative amendment proposed by Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, the game could be an alternative to the prevailing fantasy sports culture.

Fantasy Congress - Where People Play Politics!

Take this, D2X and your eight frames per second!

Since abandoning modern cameras about a decade ago, he has worked exclusively with pinhole cameras and, his current preference, their room-size equivalents. He typically constructs them himself out of wood. Like the German artist Vera Lutter, who may be the most famous practitioner in this medium today, he is drawn to the monumental. Unlike Ms. Lutter, who favors industrial subjects, he prefers landmarks set under wide, open, romantic skies worthy of Ansel Adams, whom he credits as an early influence.

The last photo in the set, "Shanghai, 2004", is the best.

This month he is directing his panoramic lensless cameras at California landmarks: the Hollywood sign, then the San Francisco skyline, Golden Gate Park and the Donner Pass.

Standing in the Dark, Catching the Light

“He was so authentic, in a way that a lot of us had never experienced,” Mr. Burns said. “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth. You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did, and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours, and you were devastated.”

He added, still seeming to wince all these years later at the memory: “Sometimes you’d do some work you thought was really great, and you’d show it to him, and he’d stand there for a while and then say, ‘Well ...’ And it was like, ‘Oh God.’ That was all it took. That ‘well.’ You knew you hadn’t done it.”

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation

Do you know anybody who voted for Kerry in 2004 and wishes he hadn’t?

...

Many of the most incompetent political hacks in any administration are below the radar of confirmation processes, and besides, someone has to fill the jobs that empty out late in an administration when the first-round draft picks head back to the private sector.

The Mere Midterms

Without their pride and willingness to sacrifice for a common goal, Koreans would speak Japanese or Chinese today. Defiantly, through a millennium or two of attack and occupation, they held on to their language and even their gene pool. When I lived in Seoul in the 1980’s, intermarriage, to a Japanese or an American or whomever, was rare and an occasion for scorn or, at best, pity. The taboos are lessening — earlier this year, the government lifted a ban against mixed-race Koreans serving in the military — but as a recent article in The Asia Times noted, “A foreigner, even another Asian, stands out.” More so on the other side of the DMZ: not long ago, a North Korean general chastised South Korea for even allowing intermarriage.

There was, in those days, a club that supported Koreans training for stunts that would get them into The Guinness Book of World Records ... [in order] to have South Korea itself inscribed as the country with the most world records.

We are obliged to focus on Islamism and the terrorist threat it has produced, to study Arabic and the work of Sayyid Qutb, but we should not fail to consult Kennan, Clausewitz or Thucydides either.

Radioactive Nationalism

Fragrance makers have released more new products in the past two years than they did in every year from 1970 to 1989 combined.

The Smell Test

As a defense against terrorism, militarizing the Great Lakes is a symbolic defeat. And it is another in a series of incremental changes that threaten to change everything that we take for granted about our country.

Fire on the Water

The new policy reflects the worst tendencies of the Bush administration -- a unilateral drive for supremacy and a rejection of treaties.

Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, at a conference in Spain this month: "Will my language be passed down over the generations to future lunar colonies? Or will another, bolder or more persistent culture surpass our efforts and put their own stamp on the predominant lunar society of the far future?"

He might as well have said, "I'll be damned if the Moon men speak Mandarin!"

Flexing Our Muscles in Space

It was a neighborhood place in a low-rent neighborhood that happened to house artists and derelicts side by side, inspiring some hard-nosed art. During her set Ms. Smith described CBGB as “this place that Hilly so generously offered to us to create new ideas, to fail, to make mistakes, to reach new heights.”

It was no surprise that real estate values finally caught up with CBGB. The wonder was that so much came out of one decrepit bar, and that CBGB lasted as long as it did.

Check out the accompanying slide show and videos.

CBGB Closes and Rock Fans Mourn

Review by Henry Kissinger.

Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.

Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War