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Bank stocks soared after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced plans to buy up stakes of $250 billion in financial firms, but worries about the economy, particularly consumer spending and the technology sector, dragged down the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes. After an early surge of 400 points after the bank buyout was unveiled, the Dow ended down 76.62 points, or 0.82 percent, closing at 9,310.99, though shares of Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley were buoyed. Meanwhile, the S&P was down 0.53 percent and the technology-heavy Nasdaq slumped 3.54 percent. "Basically the financial system is on life support," Marc Groz, managing member of Topos LLC, told Market Watch of the continued volatility. "We just gave the patient the equivalent of a few hundred volts of electricity and got his heart restarted, but that doesn't mean we can send him home."
More race trouble for Sarah Palin. No sooner had the Daily Beast’s Max Blumenthal reported that the Alaska governor has a poor record on employing blacks but her Alaska Native rural relations advisor resigned citing Mrs. Palin’s lack of commitment to diversity towards Native Alaskans. Natives make up one in five Alaskans, but Mrs. Palin finds it hard to appoint them to key posts, even though the first dude, her husband Todd, is part Yup'ik Eskimo. Her 13-member cabinet includes two. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that in a couple of cases Mrs. Palin conspicuously replaced Native office holders with whites.
The story of Barack Obama’s recent ascent in the polls has been so dominant that it’s easy for most people to overlook the parallel momentum of Democrats down-the-ticket. But it has certainly caught the Republican Party’s attention. The Politico reports that the GOP is planning to tap an extra $5 million of credit to assist their embattled senators. According to polling wunderkind Nate Silver, “[I]t is difficult to identify any race in which the Republican candidate currently has the momentum.” The Democrats are now favored to takeover eight Republican seats, putting them within one victory of the GOP’s worst nightmare: a filibuster-breaking majority of 60.
You know things are bad for John McCain in Florida when even Mickey Mouse is registering to vote against him. That application was rejected, but has provided conservatives a casus belli in their war against ACORN, the community organization. Thankfully, Matthew Yglesias cuts through the hysteria with some sanity: “There’s simply no way to gather over one million new voter registration forms without some of the forms having been filled out with bogus information.” False registrations are only a tiny fraction of the total number of new registrations, but provide conservatives cover for pushing their true aim: “to delegitimize all efforts at large-scale registration drives.”
It may be a little premature for report cards—it's unclear if yesterday's Dow surge was a turning point or an anomaly—but a column in the Financial Times grades the world leaders' performances anyway. The big winner is Gordon Brown, whose British bailout plan served as a model for other countries and quite possibly resuscitated his flailing career. His American counterpart did not do so well. President Bush weathered this one about as well as he did Katrina, says author Gideon Rachman, with a comment—"this sucker could go down"—that rivals "Heckuva job, Brownie," in showing off how out of touch he is. Sarkozy also performed well, but the meltdown's biggest winner might not yet be an underclassman: Barack Obama.
Sumner Redstone is the latest billionaire threatened with mere ordinary richness. Last week’s market turmoil nearly toppled the controlling shareholder in Viacom and CBS, who was forced to sell off large chunks of his holdings in order to back a $1.6 billion loan to expand his family’s movie-theater chain. Now Martin Peers suggests in The Wall Street Journal that Redstone—and Viacom and CBS—would be better off if he just sold off his stakes. “That might allow the 85-year-old media mogul to get out of the financial hole he has dug for himself,” Peers writes. “A new control shareholder could also provide some fresh ideas—something lacking at Mr. Redstone’s empire in recent years.”
First-time novelist Aravind Adiga tonight was awarded the £50,000 Booker prize for The White Tiger, his book about the dark side of the new India. The Guardian reports that the 33-year-old Adiga was a long shot for the prize and faced stiff competition on the short list from Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh, among others. He becomes the third first-time novelist to take the award, after Arundhati Roy in 1997 and D.B.C. Pierre in 2003. Adigao won after a "passionate debate," Michael Portillo, the chairman of the judges, told The Guardian. "It was pretty close." Portillo praised Adiga's originality and attention to "important social issues—the division between rich and poor, and issues on a global scale. And it is extremely readable." Adiga, born in Chennai in 1974, now lives in Mumbai after stints in Australia and at Columbia and Oxford.
After weeks of anticipation, Apple unveiled a new line of laptops today. The MacBook Pro is characteristically slick, with a carved inch-thin aluminum body, a glossy glass screen, and a whole bunch of difficult-to-understand tech specs. But the biggest innovation is the new multi-touch glass track pad, which ditches the mouse button for a series of iPhone-like gestures. The basic model costs a hefty $1999, but Apple also unveiled a new, less decked-out MacBook for $999.
Variety reports that Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi has lost a quarter of his wealth in recent weeks—over $2 billion. Italy’s stock market has been the hardest hit among the big finance centers in Europe and over half of Berlusconi’s losses come from his holdings in his own company, Mediaset. The outlook for Mediaset isn’t exactly rosy, but Berlusconi can take comfort in remaining the world’s richest leader.
The photographer William Claxton, who took wondrous photographs of celebrities and jazz performers, died Sunday at 80. The obituaries made the rounds, but his personal website is the best place to appreciate his work. There’s an iconic 1954 shot of Frank Sinatra; a young Dennis Hopper, looking pensive; and John Cassavetes, sprawled out on the floor as if searching for a contact lens. Claxton’s most famous work was the series of photos he took of Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter, whom he described thusly: “a tough demeanor and a good physique but an angelic face with pale white skin and, the craziest thing, one tooth missing.”
Imagine if we had to suffer through a presidential elections more often. That's what Canada is experiencing today as voters across the provinces head to the polls for the third time in four years. Our northern neighbor is the first major economic power to hold general elections since the global economic crisis began, and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to hang onto his post, if barely. As Roy MacGregor writes in The Globe and Mail, it has been "a campaign of 'failure.' Failure to impress. Failure to convince. Failure to connect." Harper’s case may be helped by the Toronto Stock Exchange: Amid its worst few weeks in the last 70 years, it has shot up today.
Princeton’s new library by Frank Gehry looks nice, but it’s missing something rather important: books. Books are so-o-h old school. “Libraries are becoming more a space where people come to access data and also more of a study space, research space and to some extent, a social space,'' said Gehry Partners' Craig Webb, the library's project designer. What few books it holds have been banished to a high-density storage place in the basement.
American foreign policy may have its limits, but American culture does not. The latest example: Harley Davidsons are on the rise in the Middle East. The Los Angeles Times reports that bike clubs are popping up across the region, and Lebanon, whose ranks of bikers have swelled in recent years, just hosted its first Harley Davidson tour. Even in fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, bikers roar around in black leather. The bikers take their inspiration from American films like Easy Rider. '"People hated the way they were because they were so free and they weren't afraid of doing what they wanted," says one biker. Adds another: "Freedom is what it's all about."
Roger Friedman has seen the new Broadway production of All My Sons, and files one of those stories that goes out of its way to say, “This is not a review.” Okay, but the key info is all here. Holmes plays Ann, a smallish role, with the choice parts reserved for Jon Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, and Patrick Wilson. Sayeth Friedman: “[Holmes] isn’t bad. She’s up against some real pros, and she holds her own. Like most movie and TV actors, her voice and projection need work. But she knows her lines, appears to understand the character, and does not embarrass herself at all.” Also, she’s “working damn hard.” And the stage door johnnies are there to see her.
Ah, the price of progress: Airlines that are unveiling in-flight wi-fi access worry that customers will use it to surf porn, Wired reports. Initially, American Airlines asked its flight attendants to keep an eye on libidinous passengers. But as Corey Caldwell of the Association of Flight Attendants says, “Flight attendants are on board to provide security and safety for passengers, not to monitor their Internet usage.” Plus, it’d make for an awkward exchange during drink orders. The solution? American Airlines has now decided to install a filter onboard, as has Delta.
Milan Kundera, the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a famous communist dissident, so it came as a bit of surprise when he was recently accused by the magazine Respekt of outing an American agent to Czech authorities in 1950. "I am totally astonished by something that I did not expect, about which I knew nothing only yesterday, and that did not happen. I did not know the man at all," the reclusive Kundera said in a statement to the Czech news agency CTK. But a Czech researcher claimed the story was extensively researched. “A murky and convoluted story has now accidentally surfaced,” he said. “It indicates there may be other reasons for his reclusiveness than we previously imagined."
Writing in The Weekly Standard, the indomitable Andrew Ferguson takes his axe to Twitter. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is the technology that allows a blogger to shoot short thoughts blasts (140 characters or less) across the screen. Ferguson notes that many august journalists have taken to Twitter to share their real-time musings whether we want them or not. During the presidential debate coverage, one Washington Post reporter tells us where he ate the night before. A New Yorker critic writes, “McCain is the Kanye of politicians.” Pretty soon the haikus became “like watching a baseball game with a dotty uncle”—which, for journalists, was a pose usually confined to polished pieces.
Say Anything... it’s not. According to Slash Film, Cameron Crowe’s next movie will star Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon in something that sounds eerily similar to Joe Versus the Volcano. Stiller is a universally disliked weapons consultant who is exiled to a military base on Hawaii. He must make sacrifices to the angry volcano gods while he tries to woo the only woman he's ever loved (Witherspoon). She's married with kids. And, if we know the Crowe oeuvre, there will be self-discovery. The untitled film begins production next year.
Last week, Connecticut became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage. Over at The New Republic, Richard Just lauds the Connecticut Supreme Court's decision, which reveals "the absurd illogic at the heart of civil unions." Opponents of same-sex marriage accidently devalue the very institution they set out to defend—"marriage, they end up arguing, is nothing so special that it can't be replicated by a parallel institution." Just then notes that "the Connecticut ruling didn't really get that much attention over the weekend." Maybe it was crowded out by the campaign and the economy. Or, "maybe that is its own form of progress."
Another cell-phone atrocity: The New York Post’s Page Six reports that at Prince’s exclusive rooftop concert, held this weekend at New York’s Gansevoort Hotel, crowd members insisted on leaving their cell phones powered up. This despite warnings that phones were wrecking the singer’s sound system. "It was so obnoxious," a bystander tells the paper. "To think a bunch of idiots can't exist without their precious cells for an hour." Guests included Spike Lee and Anderson Cooper. And speaking of strangeness, Prince insisted on having a humidifier in every room of his suite.
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