Cheat Sheet
The Best In Brief
Please register to manage your email preferences and comment on the site.
What did he know and when did he know it? Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair affected ignorance of the abuses at Abu Ghraib when the story broke in 2004, but a former foreign minister says there was a wide pool of ministerial knowledge weeks before. It’s the second time in weeks “Bliar” has been accused of lying—the first time when he exempted the Formula One racing chief from a ban on cigarette advertising.
The aspiring first lady gets a lengthy Times profile, and the McCain campaign responds with guns blazing. Readers may be split on whether it’s “gutter journalism at its worst—an unprecendented attack on a presidential candidate’s spouse,” as the Republican’s camp contends—or simply a long-winded clip job. Among the morsels: Cindy’s alleged emulation of the Princess of Wales, her four-month absence from her family after a 2004 stroke, and questions about whether she has ever traveled to Rwanda, as she claims. Best are priceless lines about her “handshaking injury” and how she “wants approval, from either her husband or the public.”
In a fascinating piece at BusinessWeek, Susan Berfield profiles BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen, a “folk hero and Hollywood villain.” Cohen, Berfield writes, has Asperger’s syndrome, “a condition that keeps him rooted in the world of objects and patterns, puzzles and computers, but leaves him floating, disoriented, in the everyday swirl of human interactions.” His free file-sharing technology now generates about half of all traffic on the Internet and has drawn the ire of the movie industry, whose pirated products are by far the most popular files that change hands.
You've read plenty of Sarah Palin profiles, but nothing captured the gonzo spirit of her Alaskan hometown quite like this week’s New York piece by Mark Jacobson. There are moose and megachurches to be sure, but also the seamier side, like the meth-heads of West Wasilla: "Get a gander at the browned-out dentition and know those boys have been cooking the nastier white lightning.” Jacobson illuminates the love-hate relationship that has emerged between the denizens of Wasilla and their homegrown star. They're overjoyed Palin put Wasilla on the map, not to mention the $1,200 she added to everyone's oil dividend check. They're less happy about the McCain operatives crowding the local hotel bar: "Don't look like local talent to me.”
It’s a long—but absorbing—story: Who murdered our dashing Freddie Woodruff (think James Bond)? The CIA station chief took a single bullet to the head near the end of his time in Tbilisi, Georgia, the former Soviet republic recently menaced by Putin’s tanks. Thriller writers despaired that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they’d lost a convenient villain but Andrew Higgins’ reconstruction of the murder suggests villainy is back in business. The cast has a glamorous barmaid, a veteran Soviet security officer, his terrified girlfriend—and a drunken bum who says, from his prison cell, he was framed for a professional killing he couldn’t have done.
Leave it to Vladimir Putin to stir up echoes of the Soviet Union by testing out Russia’s new Global Navigation Satellite System on his dog. Fifty years after Soviet pup Laika blasted into space, the prime minister used his black Labrador, Koni, as a guinea pig for Russia’s answer to the US Global Positioning System. As he slipped the locating collar onto Koni, First Deputy Premier Sergei Ivanov explained that if the dog doesn’t move-—“if it, say, lies down in a puddle”—the equipment would go into standby mode. “My dog isn’t a piglet,” Putin interrupted. “She doesn’t lie in puddles.”
Denizens of the Wall Street know New York is headed for tough times. So it was heartening to find this post, by uber-blogger Jason Kottke, celebrating the city's toughness. Kotkke cites Here is New York, a slim volume by E.B. White. The chunk excerpted here "could well have been written yesterday instead of 1949," and indeed some of E.B. White's passages have a Nostradamus quality. "The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible," writes White. He continues: "I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along…so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul." Print out and savor.
There is a confidence to Andrew Sullivan's recent essay on blogging, an ease that comes from living his material every day. Sullivan is the most prominent blogger at The Atlantic, and his piece illuminates the spirit of the new medium. "The zero-sum game of old media becomes win-win…the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs," he writes, comparing himself to an online disc jockey. Sullivan concludes: "The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding…words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now."
Hitler is better known for burning books than reading them. But at the end of the war, his library of 16,000 titles was shipped to America and they still languish in great unread stacks in the Library of Congress, Yale University, and elsewhere. Among the volumes of anti-Semitism and crazy race theories there are great American favorites, like Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and schoolboy favorites like Cervantes' Don Quixote. Author Timothy Ryback has sifted through the books and come up with the Fuhrer’s favorites, the ones he returned to time and again—even what he was reading in the bunker before he killed himself. Grisly and fascinating.
Not all polls have recorded the effect of the final presidential debate and the laugh-in at the Al Smith dinner on Thursday night, but John McCain seems to have reduced Barack Obama's lead by about 2 percent and is now behind 6.3 percent, Dick Morris writes. The Clinton critic and commentator crunches the data by comparing six polls on Real Clear Politics with a field date ending October 10-13 with seven subsequent surveys ending October 10-16, and concludes: “If the financial markets stop hogging the headlines and McCain exploits the tax and spending issue he developed (with the considerable aid of Joe the Plumber) it is very possible that he could close the race further, perhaps bringing it to a tie in the next ten days. This race is far, far from over!”
It’s not out in the States until November 14, but the first reviews for the new Bond movie are already in. The BBC calls Quantum of Solace “badder, better, but not bigger.” 007 fans with short attention spans will rejoice at the reduced running time—a full half-hour less than Casino Royale—which makes for a “leaner, tauter experience,” as Bond hunts down the killers of his beloved Vesper. And the Beeb raves about new Bond girls Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton, as well as Daniel Craig’s interpretation of the muscle-bound super-agent, whom “he has managed to reinvent.” Can’t wait until November 14? The film makes its premiere in the UK on Halloween.
"Sending a text message with a numeric keypad feels primitive and improvisational—like the way prisoners speak to each other by tapping on the walls of their cells in Darkness at Noon…” This from Louis Menand’s wonderfully cranky piece this week’s New Yorker. Menand makes his personal feelings on the medium clear: "People sometimes text when they are close enough to talk face to face. People like to text. Why is that?" His best line: "The most common text message must be 'k.' It means 'I have nothing to say, but God forbid that you should think that I am ignoring your message.'”
From the Independent: Daniel Granger was five when his then 25-year-old mother, Patricia Granger, was sexually assaulted, strangled, stabbed, and dumped in a stream close to her Sheffield home. In August, on the anniversary of her death, the now 16-year old Daniel launched a website called whokilledmymum.com. Granger posted pictures of Patricia, aerial photographs of the crime site, pleas by other relatives, and a clock that counted off the seconds since her death. His hard work paid off—thanks to a tip from the site, the police are currently questioning two men, ages 51 and 59, in connection with the murder. Daniel’s one step closer to his goal of putting “my mum's killer away, to let her rest in peace, and to allow myself and my family to try to continue life as best we can.”
We don’t like to get sentimental, but an email posted at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog this week is worth a look no matter your partisan inclination. It’s from reader whose parents—an elderly, interracial couple—voted for Obama this weekend in Georgia. “After seven decades of constant struggle, my father walked into that booth and knew that his life's work was now done,” the correspondent writes. “My stepmother can think of every person who secretly and not-so-secretly thought of her as some kind of race traitor, smile, and think, ‘I told you so!’ Obama will win, I'm sure he will. But today, my parents did. I am so deeply, deeply grateful.”
This has the makings of a great battle between animal lovers and tree huggers. The Australian government is urging consumers to switch to wild kangaroo meat from beef and lamb because farm animals give off greenhouse gases that cause global warming. But the good people of Oz are a bit reluctant to throw their country’s trademark marsupial on the barbie. “I've never really felt inclined to eat Skippy,'' said Carolyn Bristow from Melbourne. “It grosses me out, actually. I don't want to eat the coat of arms.”
Partner Sites: Expedia| Hotels| Hotwire| Urbanspoon| Vimeo
