Cheat Sheet

Two weeks before Election Day, longtime McCain aide Mark Salter sounds off to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a must-read interview, defending McCain from what he calls Obama’s negative attacks, and tackling Palin’s readiness to be president, among other juicy bits. His biggest target? The media, of course. “I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen,” Salter said. “And I think they’ve rationalized it, they think they're on the level with McCain, that he’s not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn't know what happened to the old press corps.”

Barack Obama will take a few days off the trail starting Thursday to visit his 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who is seriously ill. Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on the Obama campaign plane on Monday, “In the last few weeks her health has deteriorated to the point where her situation is very serious.” The announcement scuttles planned rallies in Des Moines, Iowa, and Madison, Wis., on Thursday; the Democratic nominee resumes campaigning Saturday in the West.

The Dow leapt 413.21 points to close at 9,265.43, on strong profits from Halliburton and Fed chief Bernanke's thumbs-up to an economic stimulus package. Exxon Mobil and NRG Energy also gained ground. "You've got significant rebound capability on these stocks," Wayne Wilbanks, chief investment officer at Wilbanks Smith & Thomas, told Bloomberg News of energy shares. "They took the brunt of the forced hedge-fund selling. There's no other way to explain Halliburton going from $33 to $16 in three weeks." Bernanke told the House Budget Committee a second stimulus plan was "appropriate," provided it was "well-targeted" and improved access to credit for consumers, homebuyers, and businesses. Also adding to the good news: The Conference Board's index of leading economic indicators rose unexpectedly in September. A South Korean bailout and a Dutch infusion of capital for ING pushed Asian and European stock indexes higher, as well.

New York magazine brings a stellar article on the downfall of one of Manhattan’s most glamorous figures: the I-Banker. Vanessa Grigoriadis follows around a couple of downtrodden (read: one Porsche instead of two) victims of the financial crisis, and finds them broken men now that their pricey Connecticut estates won’t pay for themselves. Her most compelling argument is that the bankers have not just lost money, they have lost leverage, the bragging rights and promise of future wealth that made them feel invincible. “Leverage says that the rules of quotidian life—I must have $2,000 in my account, to pay my rent—do not apply to you,” Grigoriadis writes. “It says that you are so right that you should place bets on whatever chip you happen to have in your hand, because you cannot fail. It makes living on the float feel good, not dirty and cheap the way it does for a supermarket clerk with fifteen credit cards.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, most people dreamt in black and white, but by the 1960s the dreamscape had shifted, with the majority of sleepers reporting color dreams. A new study by Eva Murzyn, a British psychology student, has found that while almost all people under the age of 25 now dream in color, many over the age of 55 still report dreaming in black and white. "It suggests there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed," said Murzyn. Sharing your love of classic cinema with your children, in other words, could color the way they dream for life.

Time alerts us to a new weight-loss craze sweeping Japan and keeping Filipino fruit traders in business: the Morning Banana Diet. The regimen, which is simple enough—a banana and lukewarm water in the morning, standard meals for lunch and dinner, and a bedtime before midnight—is spreading like wildfire among many (already svelte, according to the article) Japanese men and women. Morning Banana books have sold over 730,000 copies; a TV program featured a singer who had lost 15 pounds on the diet in six weeks. Now, the country cannot keep bananas in stock. By noon, all of Japan is bare of bunches, despite an 80% increase in imports.

In the increasingly unlikely outcome of an Obama loss in November, the Democratic presidential candidate might want to consider a career as a Mad Man: Last week, he edged out Apple, Zappos.com, Nike, and Coors to win AdAge.com's 2008 marketer of the year. "I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president," an AOL executive told AdAge, while BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine attributed the candidate's success to social-networking campaigns. "It's a fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said. One executive who voted for Coors disagreed with Obama's marketing win, charging that political campaigns ran "false and misleading" ads and that political advertising in general went against the ANA's mission. Still, he's sexier than a Mac. Does that make McCain PC?

Recently, the writer Devin Friedman realized that he had only two African-American friends. So in the spirit of participatory journalism, he began looking for more on Craigslist. While Friedman writes in the resulting GQ story that “this project started to feel like the worst kind of tokenism,” he also made a genuine effort to get to know people outside his usual social circle. By experiment’s end, using Craigslist flyers and the more old-fashioned friends-of-friends approach, he’d found “ten guys with whom I’d gladly eat dinner once a month and talk about their kids (which is what it means to be friends with someone at age 36).” Say this: it’s unique.

David Thomson in this morning’s Guardian: Once upon a time you could go to the theater and see your economic circumstances taken seriously. There was Chaplin’s City Lights, The Grapes of Wrath, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The “talent in American pictures was from literature, the theatre and journalism, with educated backgrounds and a shared sense of the moral identity in being American.” In other words, they got what was happening. Today, facing what might be our next depression, our auteurs leave much to be desired. “Today's talent consists of absurdly rich young people who have made the hits of the past dozen years,” Thomson writes. “They know very little about life, except what they have to lose.”

Here's a dubious but highly entertaining study: The BBC reports that the 1977 Bee Gees' hit Stayin' Alive might help you to stay alive. The song's meter is 103 beats per minute, and CPR ideally compresses the chest 100 times per minute. Many people are uncertain of the correct rhythm for chest compression during CPR, and practicing to the song's beat could triple cardiac arrest survival rates, according to an author of a recent study. Doctors and students who trained to the song performed above the recommended rate, which is imperfect but better than performing below it.

The New York Times weighs in today with a checkup on the presidential tickets' medical histories. Barack Obama and Joe Biden check out, more or less, with a clean bill of health. (The Times' classifies Obama's "difficulty in stopping smoking" as "a notable medical problem." Thankfully, he seems to be chewing Nicorette.). Questions remain about the GOP ticket, however, due mostly to noncooperation. John McCain released 1,200 pages of medical records last May, but has refused to clarify further questions. Okay, so we can understand why the McCain campaign would be reluctant to discuss the health of a 72-year old, cancer-surviving nominee with a 1,200 page dossier. But why, exactly, has Sarah Palin refused to release her records? What's she hiding--frostbite?

The laundry list of John McCain's campaign errors has gotten so lengthy that it is likely to inspire scholarship one day. Over at the Financial Times, Clive Crook points out an overlooked but fundamental entry: poor salesmanship. McCain's been so busy attacking Obama's tax plan that he's failed to point out the simple fact that "the typical US household would get a bigger tax cut under Mr. McCain's proposals than under Mr. Obama's." Once you factor in McCain's health-care plan, his tax cuts are larger than Obama's, even for middle-class families. "Odd, don't you think," Crook asks, "that the McCain campaign should think this unworthy of emphasis?"

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is headed out on the hustings this week after officially endorsing Obama. But as Red Herring reports, “he will hit the stump as Eric the Engineer rather than Eric the CEO because the search giant is officially neutral in the presidential campaign.” Google, which reported last week its net income rose 26 percent to $1.35 billion in the third quarter, has recently shown a greater willingness to get involved in legislative issues, especially network neutrality and broadband access, two issues on which it is closely aligned with Obama. “Jumping on the Obama bandwagon a day after Colin Powell endorsed Senator Obama is not exactly taking a big risk,” Robert Atkinson, president of the Washington think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told Red Herring. “It's certainly possible McCain could win, but if one's a gambling man Obama’s chances are looking good.”

Few political instruments are as finely tuned as former-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton's saber. He points it at Russia today on the op-ed page of The Washington Post. "What most risks 'provoking' Moscow,'" he writes, "is not Western resolve but Western weakness." How do we show our resolve? First, the West should admit Georgia and Ukraine to NATO. Second, it should bolster military cooperation with central and eastern European countries. And third, the U.S. should go full-sail ahead with missile defense plans in Poland. "U.S. opposition to Russia's recent behavior should not rest on a desire to 'punish' Russia," Bolton writes, "but on the critical need to brace Moscow before its behavior becomes even more unacceptable."

A tidbit from Media Bistro's Galleycat that warms The Daily Beast's heart: Sales of Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Scoop, from whose pages this website takes its name, were up 83 percent for the week ending October 12. With overall book sales still pretty low—Nielsen Bookscan reports 3,000 copies sold since it started tracking in 2001—we won’t yet be demanding royalties.

Madonna may be fabulously rich and famous, but according to India Knight she's just like you! Madonna "got married, like you do." And, um, "she was doing what women do, especially in the first flush of a new relationship, which is to love everything about their boyfriend and adopt it as their own." And now she's divorced. Like you! "This is the story of many a modern divorce," Knight writes, lauding Madge’s feminist credentials. "What kills many marriages today is the erosion of roles that had been clearly demarcated for centuries." Okay, so this might not make Betty Friedan proud, but it's worth considering Knight's point that "unusually for a celebrity, Madonna's private life seems real, and thus provokes empathy rather than derision.”

Will history repeat itself? Several observers of the financial crisis have pegged the upcoming summit at Camp David as a new Bretton Woods—the post WWII summit that created the IMF and World Bank. Sebastian Mallaby cautions against such optimism. First, the tonics for our current woes—"moving swap contracts between financial institutions onto centralized exchanges" and shrinking "the pyramids of debt in the financial system"—don't need international solutions. Moreover, Britain and France are unlikely to cede control of the IMF to rising powers like China and India, which international reform would require.