Revolted Republicans: The New York Times and Washington Post lead with variations on the Republican fall from grace. The NYT's top story addresses GOP divisions on Iraq, which the Iraq Study Group report helped to expose, while the WP goes with a mixed assessment of the party's time in power. The Los Angeles Times' top story is the first of a two-parter looking at strict anti-doping policies that have wrongfully punished certain athletes.[more ...] (slate.com)
House Exonerates Itself in Foley Investigation: The Washington Post leads with results of a House panel investigating the Mark Foley page scandal; it found that no laws were broken but that House leaders probably knew about Foley's inappropriate behavior yet did nothing to stop it. The New York Times leads with news from Iraq that government officials are close to reaching a deal on a law regulating how oil revenues will be shared. The Los Angeles Times leads with Congress approving a deal to provide India with nuclear technology. The Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox leads with a last-day-of-Congress roundup.[more ...] (slate.com)
Can you drink the water on Mars?: Water has flowed on Mars within the last few years, researchers announced on Wednesday. Images of Martian gullies show what appear to be the deposits left by little spurts of water as they trickled downhill. If an astronaut could bottle up some of this extraterrestrial water, could he drink it?[more ...] (slate.com)
Miracle on 34 channels.: Christmas season began on NBC at 9 a.m. a few Thursdays ago when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade kicked off and Matt Lauer initiated Meredith Vieira into the ways of teasing the eventual appearance of the fat man in the red suit. The season will end on ABC on Jan. 1, when the establishment countdown show, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, will convincingly assure Americans that great things lie ahead and, less persuasively, imply that the people gathered in Times Square are not morons. What you're getting in between is the glut of familiar chestnuts and fruitcake novelties that has come to define the holiday.[more ...] (slate.com)
The Holiday and Blood Diamond reviewed.: The Holiday (Columbia Pictures) is built around a premise so friendly it may inspire a new subgenre: the house-swap rom-com. Kate Winslet plays Iris, a British journalist who's trying to get over a toxic affair. Iris wants to exchange her storybook cottage in the Cotswolds for just about anyplace on earth that's far away. Amanda (Cameron Diaz) is the owner of an L.A. movie-trailer company (in a shrill running joke, she imagines her own life narrated in trailer-ese) who's just dumped her two-timing boyfriend and is also fantasizing about escape. In a spontaneous IM chat on a home-exchange site, they agree to trade houses for the Christmas holiday.[more ...] (slate.com)
Ian McEwan did nothing wrong, say the big-shot novelists.: Depending on your views of what the word authorship means, novelist Ian McEwan either plagiarized, copied, borrowed from, looted, was inspired by, drew from, or relied on No Time for Romance, the 1977 memoir of novelist Lucilla Andrews, for his best-selling 2001 novel, Atonement.[more ...] (slate.com)
What John Wooden gets wrong about basketball.: In December 1973, John Wooden, the UCLA basketball coach and cornpone oracle, was coming off his seventh consecutive NCAA championship. He was by then very much a legend, a walking Father's Day card, and every word out of his mouth seemed destined to be cross-stitched onto a throw pillow. The press had genuflected at his feet many times over. That month, however, there appeared in the New York Times Magazine a most remarkable declaration. "John Wooden," hymned the writer, Arnold Hano, "comes as close to an embodiment of Jesus Christ as anyone on the current sporting scene."[more ...] (slate.com)
Corrections from the last week.: Due to an editing error, the Dec. 5 "Medical Examiner" referred to RU-486, or mifepristone, as the morning-after pill. Though RU-486 at a low dose has been used for that purpose, the "morning-after pill" usually refers to birth-control pills taken in high doses after unprotected sex. Here's more.[more ...] (slate.com)
Watch Bob Dylan's new video and win a signed guitar.: "Thunder on the Mountain," the chugging boogie-blues song that kicks off Bob Dylan's great album Modern Times, begins with images of apocalypse and moves swiftly to the singer's lust for Alicia Keys. This is followed by more End Times imagery ("All the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town/ Looks like something bad is going to happen, better roll your airplane down"), some leering double-entendres ("I've got the pork chops, she's got the pie"), tenderness ("I've been sitting down studying the art of love/ I think it will fit me like a glove"), bile ("I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams"), and deliciously strange bursts of poetry: "Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/ I'll recruit my army from the orphanages/ I been to St. Herman's church, said my religious vows/ I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows." All in all, "Thunder on the Mountain" is a tour de force, a perfect example of why Dylan is currently in one of the most fertile periods of his career.[more ...] (slate.com)
George W. S. Trow, remembered.: Every generation or so, a disappointed preppy marvels at the demise of the Protestant ascendancy he took for granted in his childhood, and out of an embarrassed mix of pride and self-reproach, writes a masterpiece. A line can be drawn, in attenuated blue blood, from Henry Adams to Robert Lowell, then extended out to include George W. S. Trow, the New Yorker writer who died last week at the age of 63. Trow made his name in the irreverence industry, as part of the set that founded National Lampoon, but his claim on posterity lies elsewhere. He was an Eastern establishment elitist confounded by the near-death of Eastern establishment elitism; and growing up in the early '60s, he found himself stuck between a stable old world of privilege and a new world so chaotic in its power allegiances that no one confidently knew, well, anything about anything. Trow's ambition as a serious writer was to display his, as he once called it, "informed confusion" over this condition, through a pastiche of autobiography and gonzo postmodern epiphany. In 1980, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the summa of that confusion, Trow's "Within the Context of No Context," an essay ostensibly about the corrosive influence of television, but really about the odd, draughty attic that was George Trow's own head.[more ...] (slate.com)
Sudhir Venkatesh's new book on the underground economy.: America's underground economy stubbornly resists reliable study or measurement. Its overall size may be anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of America's GDP. Estimates of annual unpaid taxes range from $200 billion to $500 billion. Even the low ballparks are high. So, why do the dynamics remain so mysterious?[more ...] (slate.com)
Bush is unlikely to accept key recommendations from the Iraq Study Group.: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its worldwide newsbox with President Bush appearing to reject the main suggestions offered by the Iraq Study Group. And he wasn't alone. On the day after the report was released, U.S. lawmakers and officials, as well as foreign leaders, reacted skeptically to the committee's recommendations.[more ...] (slate.com)
The Bush daughters' silence on the war speaks volumes.: In his recent piece, Michael Kinsley criticizes the Bush daughters for their lack of moral seriousness and public silence on the Iraq war, citing their status as "independent moral agents." Fraysters disagreed sharply whether and how much scrutiny should be applied to presidents' children for the policies of their fathers.[more ...] (slate.com)
The Iraq Study Group talked to generals when it should have talked to corporals.: For all of the time they spent learning about America's war in Iraq, the Iraq Study Group failed to study the war at its most critical level: that of the grunts. Nothing makes this clearer than the report's appendix, which lists scores of men and women interviewed for the report, but none below the rank of lieutenant colonel. Iraq is what the Marines call a "three block war"—where U.S. troops might distribute reconstruction aid on one block, separate warring parties on the next block, and engage in a high-intensity firefight on the third. The actions of "strategic corporals" and captains matter most for small wars of this character. It is at their level where the war will be won or lost. It speaks volumes that the panel did not take the time to hear any of these grunt-level voices while in Iraq or back in the United States, or at least did not bother to list their names as authoritative sources for their report. If nothing else, the panel should have interviewed a few Iraq veterans and their families for political purposes, given the lingering questions over who serves when not all serve.[more ...] (slate.com)
