We’ve reached the stage of the campaign in which the Mittster gets to sit down with bigfoot political journalists and talk about bigfoot political issues. No more of the trivia that dominated the primaries: this man could be the next POTUS. The latest polls show him closing on President Obama in three key battleground states, and Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, has cut the odds on him being elected to 11/8—bet $80 to win $110. (Obama is still the 4/7 favorite.) Let’s see what he’s got to say. No, really. If elected, he told Halperin, he will bring the unemployment rate down to below six per cent; persuade both parties in Congress to reach a historic agreement on taxes and spending; turn the United States into ... Continue reading →
We’ve reached the stage of the campaign in which the Mittster gets to sit down with bigfoot political journalists and talk about bigfoot political issues. No more of the trivia that dominated the primaries: this man could be the next POTUS. The latest polls show him closing on President Obama in three key battleground states, and Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, has cut the odds on him being elected to 11/8—bet $80 to win $110. (Obama is still the 4/7 favorite.) Let’s see what he’s got to say. No, really. If elected, he told Halperin, he will bring the unemployment rate down to below six per cent; persuade both parties in Congress to reach a historic agreement on taxes and spending; turn the United States into ... Continue reading →
The First Warm Evening of the YearJamie M. Saul Love. It's what surrounds us, what binds us together, what many of us believe is the most important thing in the world. It's also the subject of Jamie M. Saul's debut novel. Geoffrey Tremont enjoys his life as a bachelor, but when he receives news of his friend Laura's death, everything changes in an instant. Not because she died — they had drifted apart quite a bit over the years — but because she's made Geoffrey the executor of her will. He meets Marian, Laura's best friend, and through her, Geoffrey realizes how important love is and what he's been missing all these years. White HorseAlex Adams If you're not in the mood for something bright ... Continue reading →
If you were thinking of advising your nephew or niece to go into software programming, think again. The hours are long, there’s a lot of competition from Europe and the sub-continent, and for every Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates there are tens of thousands of modestly remunerated back-office grunts. Lawyers, on the other hand, tend to win every which way: just ask M.Z., who, so far, must be finding his twenty-ninth year rather trying. Zuckerberg’s torture-by-attorney didn’t start in the past twenty-four hours, when law firms in New York and California initiated the first of what is sure to be a slew of lawsuits related to last week’s controversial I.P.O. Ever since February, when Facebook filed its initial investment prospectus, the youthful C.E.O. has had ... Continue reading →
Facing criticisms from some within his own party, notably Newark mayor Cory Booker and former auto czar Steve Rattner, about a new ad from the Obama campaign that accuses Romney and Bain of closing down a Kansas steel mill and ruthlessly abandoning its workers to their fate, Obama used the press conference to defend the focus on Bain. Asked by Hans Nichols, of Bloomberg News, about the comments from Booker and Rattner, and about his view of private equity more generally. Obama gave a lengthy reply that is worth reading (or watching) in full. Here it is: Well, first of all, I think Corey Booker is an outstanding mayor. He’s doing great work in Newark and obviously helping to turn that city around. And I ... Continue reading →
Facing criticisms from some within his own party, notably Newark mayor Cory Booker and former auto czar Steve Rattner, about a new ad from the Obama campaign that accuses Romney and Bain of closing down a Kansas steel mill and ruthlessly abandoning its workers to their fate, Obama used the press conference to defend the focus on Bain. Asked by Hans Nichols, of Bloomberg News, about the comments from Booker and Rattner, and about his view of private equity more generally. Obama gave a lengthy reply that is worth reading (or watching) in full. Here it is: Well, first of all, I think Corey Booker is an outstanding mayor. He’s doing great work in Newark and obviously helping to turn that city around. And I ... Continue reading →
ABSTRACT: THE WORLD OF SURVEILLANCE about drones. The prospect of unmanned flight has been around—depending on your definition—since Archytas of Tarentum reputedly designed a steam-powered mechanical pigeon, in the fourth century B.C., or since Nikola Tesla, in 1898, demonstrated a radio-controlled motorboat at an exposition in Madison Square Garden. By the sixties the Air Force was deploying unmanned reconnaissance jets over Southeast Asia. Still, it was the advent, in the mid-nineties, of the Global Positioning System, along with advances in microcomputing, that ushered in the possibility of automated unmanned flight. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, developed a keen interest. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and manhunts in places like Yemen, the military applications, and the corporations devoted to serving them (Lockheed Martin, Northrop ... Continue reading →
For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.The gunmen gazed at the man they had been ordered to kill. Morgan was nearly six feet tall, ... Continue reading →
