Adam Khan’s

Trail

Friday 16 December ’11

• Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011.

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Wednesday 30 November ’11

• In its first serious act, the Arab League sanctions Syria.
  Travel bans on officials, frozen assets, reduced trade.
  Vote was 19-2: Iraq abstained, Lebanon against.

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Thursday 6 October ’11

• Steve Jobs, 56, joins the pantheon.
  The 2005 Stanford commencement address.
  The TidBITS obituary, with many links in the comments.

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Monday 5 September ’11

• Turkey is more beleaguered than we realize,
  muses M K Bhadrakumar in Asia Times.

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Friday 26 August ’11

• After Steve Jobs’ resignation, the Daringfireball round-up of anecdotes:
  Dave Winer, David Cairns, Vic Gundotra,
  Allen Paltrow, Jonathan Berger, Marc Hedlund.

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Thursday 7 April ’11

• Israel performs the world’s first
  interception of a hostile short-range rocket.

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Tuesday 22 February ’11

• Michael Totten reposts his masterly visit to Tripoli
  in light of Libya’s pending liberation.

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Monday 31 January ’11

• Netanyahu speaks: “The peace between Israel and Egypt has endured for over three decades and our goal is to ensure that these relations continue.”

• US and Canadian Multinational Force & Observers await evacuation from Sinai, Debka reports. They’ve been there since 1981
  to observe and preserve demilitarization.

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Wednesday 26 January ’11

• After Tunisia, young Egyptians riot.
  A poster of Mubarak is torn down.

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Thursday 13 January ’11

• Gerry Rafferty, 63, sails upon the waters.

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Saturday 2 October ’10

• Constantly two generations ahead: Stuxnet confounds and amazes.

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Wednesday 22 September ’10

• The GOP presents a Pledge to America.
  Among the promises: that every bill cite constitutional authority.

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Sunday 29 August ’10

• Roger Scruton’s oikophobes (PDF) are
  Yoram Hazony’s New Paradigmers.

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Wednesday 18 August ’10

• Palestinians in Lebanon gain right to work.
  Next up, property rights.

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Tuesday 13 July ’10

• “You come for Crumb, you stay for Harvey.” —Neil Gaiman.
  Harvey Pekar, comics writer, 1940-2010

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Wednesday 7 July ’10

• Video and transcript of the joint Obama-Netanyahu press conference.
  Bibi’s “one final point” and his reference to Mark Twain — classy.

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Monday 28 June ’10

• Spengler: We lost Turkey due to nation-building in Iraq.

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Friday 4 June ’10

• Krauthammer on those troublesome Jews;
  Kristol in praise of blockades.

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Saturday 29 May ’10

• 24 and Lost are dead. Long live 24 and Lost!
  From The New York Times and the Huffington Post.

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Sunday 16 May ’10

• Chomsky denied entry into Israel.
  Personally I hope his ticket was non-refundable.

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Saturday 3 April ’10

• The essential iPad apps
  according to Silicon Alley Insider.

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Monday 22 March ’10

• Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion,
  explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon.
  Happy Dependence Day, America! Love, Mark Steyn

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Wednesday 27 January ’10

• What a find:
  Walter Russell Mead’s Blog.

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Thursday 21 January ’10

• The Man from Massachussetts:
  One year in, overreach has made the US President
  less powerful than the most junior senator.

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Thursday 3 December ’09

• Climategate so far.
  Just how close were we to catastrophe at Copenhagen?

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Friday 20 November ’09

• Sixty Hours of Terror — the Mumbai attacks,
  start to finish, reported by Jason Motlagh

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Saturday 14 November ’09

• Shoes indoors: on or off?

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Wednesday 16 September ’09

• The May 29, 2008 story by Stanley Kurtz
  outlining Obama’s relationship with ACORN.

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Tuesday 1 September ’09

• “Helping developers do more with more.”
  Snow Leopard: The Ars Technica review by John Siracusa.

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Sunday 16 August ’09

• Hamas shoot-out in Gaza with new radical group
  suggests Palestinian splintering ad infinitum.

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Friday 10 July ’09

• Iranians are back on the streets,
  reports The New York Times.

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Monday 6 July ’09

• Robert McNamara, 93.
  Obituary by The Washington Post.

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Wednesday 17 June ’09

• Spengler provides the first interesting look at the Iranian presidential election, arguing that the ayatollahs must appear militant to fend off their main true threat: not Israel, not the US, not the Saudis, but the Sunni Taliban in Pakistan.

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Monday 15 June ’09

• Netanyahu placates Obama;
  Administration “welcomes the important step forward”.

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Monday 8 June ’09

• Glick parses Obama’s giving Israel the finger in Cairo.

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Monday 1 June ’09

• At last, someone takes on gay marriage.

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Wednesday 1 April ’09

• The faces of Israel’s new government.

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Tuesday 24 March ’09

• Labor votes to join Likud government, 58% to 42.
  Netanyahu calls Barak to congratulate.

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Thursday 12 March ’09

• “One must make a stand. One simply must.”
  Christopher Hitchens, embroiled in Lebanon.

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Thursday 12 February ’09

• Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear Mr Darwin, 200 today,
  for giving us the Origin of Species, for giving us ourselves.

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Monday 9 February ’09

• Barry Rubin delineates the consensus
  that is the Israeli polity for now.

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Saturday 31 January ’09

• “Thank you, BBC.”
  Michael Palin on the secret origin of the name
  Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

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Thursday 22 January ’09

• On Obama’s first day,
  an impressive boot in the lobbyist revolving door (the text).

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Monday 19 January ’09

• Not Egypt’s government but its Bedouin smugglers seem to hold
  the keys to future Arab-Israeli peace,
  argue Efraim Inbar and Mordechai Kedar.

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Wednesday 14 January ’09

• Demography bore Gunnar Heinsohn argues that neither Islam nor Israel, but
  UNRWA made Gaza into fertile ground for angry young men.

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Tuesday 6 January ’09

• We need real states with real security forces;
  John Bolton, Giora Eiland, Sam Brownback and Daniel Pipes on the three-state solution
  (as mocked at foreignpolicy.com and feared at nytimes.com).

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Monday 29 December ’08

• “Dore Gold debunks disproportionate force in Gaza;”:http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=378&PID=0&IID=2808&TTL=Did_Israel_Use_“Disproportionate_Force”_in_Gaza
  international law defines it not by what the other guy did first
  but by what you’re trying to achieve.

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Monday 6 February ’12

• ”Programmer“ is an overgeneralization.

• Zap yourself into the zone.

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Sunday 5 February ’12

• Hama families speak up about the atrocities of 1982.

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Saturday 4 February ’12

• Brain Pickings’ 11 Best Psychology and Philosophy Books of 2011.

• Toca Boca: ingenious iOS games for kids and not such.

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Thursday 2 February ’12

• mytasteinwomen.com.

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Wednesday 1 February ’12

• Ritalin is bunk.

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Saturday 28 January ’12

• On the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes by John Pemble.

• Marxist academic Slavoj Žižek on what are not proletarian protests but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.

• Some of what you might have wanted to know about scientology by Rachel Aviv.

• How Tariq Ali both gave and received on-the-spot guidance in North Korea.

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Tuesday 24 January ’12

• After an unhappy Treasury bills offering, “Egypt faces a disaster of biblical proportions, and the world will do nothing about it,” writes Spengler.

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Thursday 19 January ’12

• Mark Helprin sums it up on attacking Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Unusually, he cogently summarizes the reasons Iran wants the bomb.

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Wednesday 18 January ’12

• Video tribute to Brighton shot as a series of stills.

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Tuesday 17 January ’12

• What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? 192 responses to this year’s question from The Edge.

• Conrad Black. What he said.

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Monday 16 January ’12

• Anti-depressants are bunk.

• It’s not the economy, stupid. Much like the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, Daniel Bell, co-founder with Irving Kristol of The Public Interest, believed that the economic, the political and the social are separate realms and must be kept in healthy balance.

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Friday 13 January ’12

• On parking in LA Mag — the history, the psychology, the economics.

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Thursday 12 January ’12

• Nice post by the always sensible Boyink re taking on a failed project.

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Sunday 8 January ’12

• Sitting in the very first row is perfect, hard-core movie-going.

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Wednesday 4 January ’12

• John Malkovich on Charlie Rose.

  John Malkovich: The world is in fact, well, if you’re anywhere near as lucky as I have been, but even if you’re just moderately lucky, the world is in fact an exquisitely beautiful, endlessly fascinating place filled often with spectacular people.

  Charlie Rose: That’s exactly the way I feel.

  JM: You know…

  CR: Exactly!

• Some probabilistic, and in restrospect kind of obvious, methods for seeing who in Facebook is interested in you. Here’s looking at you, XXX.

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Tuesday 3 January ’12

• More vital than ever is the city, argues Edward Glaeser.

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Monday 2 January ’12

• Pico Iyer on travel writing.

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Saturday 31 December ’11

• Can we home knowledge workers learn from the monks and nuns who preceded us?

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Thursday 29 December ’11

• Ooh, shmell that shmells. Polish researchers have found that personality types have smells, and that people can smell ‘em. Via Ofer Melnick.

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Wednesday 28 December ’11

• There’s a name for something I’ve always wanted to do and lacked the gumption and follow-through and doubted it: Radical Honesty. The FAQ.

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Tuesday 27 December ’11

• Ambient Star Trek bridge sounds. For working geeks, via http://reedmaniac.com.

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Monday 26 December ’11

• A chocolate pilgrimage to Brussels.

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Friday 23 December ’11

• A Capella version of ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky” by Holmes.

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Thursday 22 December ’11

• A Riche history: The café at the heart of revolutionary Cairo.

• Julian Barnes visits Sibelius’s house.

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Wednesday 21 December ’11

• A statement from Louis C.K. on the direct sale of his Beacon Theatre special.

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Monday 19 December ’11

• In this Haaretz article on Israelis’ dependence on cars due to lack of adequate public transport, the word “bus” appears 8 times, “train” only once, “bicycle” not at all.

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Friday 16 December ’11

• The English-speaking Left’s Orwellian language war against Israel continues without subtlety. The Yom Kippur War is now called merely the 1973 Middle East War, the Six-Day War the 1967 Middle East War. First it was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then Israel-Palestine, then Israel/Palestine, and now, in December 2011, for the first time I see in a transcript from the UK Houses of Parliament, Palestine-Israel. The next logical step is Palestine/Israel, then finally just Palestine. But then what happens when Israel stubbornly refuses to disappear despite this spell? Probably nothing. How frustrating for venal yafei nefesh everywhere.

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Thursday 15 December ’11

• Koshering the White House kitchen.

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Wednesday 14 December ’11

• Sometimes luminous, sometimes tedious piece on writing by Sven Birkerts in the increasingly nice Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Monday 12 December ’11

• Hitch on Nietzsche: Am I Really Stronger?

• Irit and I were discussing this regarding ET, which still feels contemporary: in arts, entertainment and style, it’s been Groundhog Day for 20 years. “Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.”

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Sunday 11 December ’11

• Scotland’s early industrialisation produced great wealth and great poverty and after two centuries is yet to tackle that fundamental inequity. Lesley Riddoch compares Scotland’s failure and Finland’s success.

• Red Bull’s funky new Amsterdam offices.

• An argument that at the euro summit Cameron overplayed his hand.

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Tuesday 6 December ’11

• The heroic Spartacus star formerly known as Issur Danielovitch Demsky is mellow in his living room.

• Walter Russell Mead argues that after the 20th century Age of Hamilton, the time is ripe to re-explore Jefferson.

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Monday 5 December ’11

• Rashid Khalidi speaks at length to Haaretz. Agree or not, it’s required reading.

• Israel implements some aspects of the Trajtenberg report. Looks like steps in the right direction.

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Sunday 4 December ’11

• “European “normality” was based to a large extent on West German “abnormality”. Now that the reunified Germany is becoming more “normal”, it is undermining European “normality.” A sobering analysis of Deutsch affairs by Tony Corn.

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Saturday 3 December ’11

• On hotels and the delectable feeling of dépaysé.

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Thursday 1 December ’11

• A review of some recent books on death.

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Wednesday 30 November ’11

• Jeff hearts “Xanadu”.

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Sunday 27 November ’11

• David Brooks on Charlie Rose discusses the new political schism in America, the recent rise of narcissism in the culture, and some general trends in the thousands of life summaries he’s solicited from readers over 70.

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Tuesday 22 November ’11

• The Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Economics blogs.

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Friday 18 November ’11

• Where exactly is Hogwarts?

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Sunday 13 November ’11

• Israel’s new fence along the Egyptian border is going up fast.

• Clive James on James Garner.

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Tuesday 8 November ’11

• China and Walmart: the symbiosis, the similarities.

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Sunday 6 November ’11

• American dogs of war, a photo essay. Good, good.

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Saturday 29 October ’11

• Remember Alan Partridge’s masterful narration of The Spy Who Loved Me. So far there isn’t anybody who’s performed it quite so well. Actually, probably better this way.

• My second favorite ELO cover: Twilight performed by alphamai1300 on YouTube.

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Wednesday 26 October ’11

• Defeated US politician sues for loss of livelihood. What next.

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Sunday 23 October ’11

• Beautiful piece by Bruce Weber of The New York Times on his second bike ride across America.

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Saturday 22 October ’11

• We need to go back to nature in order to move forward. Amazing futuristic ways to be smart about energy in your own house by Philips at Dutch Design Week.

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Friday 21 October ’11

• Obama’s well-deserved Mission Accomplished speech on Libya.

• Was the ’60s a rehearsal for this? Occupy Wall Street, and The Guardian’s page about it.

• Dead. Qua-daffy. The NYT’s potted (and potty) history. “By the time he was done, Libya had no parliament, no unified military command, no political parties, no unions, no civil society and no nongovernmental organizations.”

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Wednesday 19 October ’11

• Joseph Epstein on the aphorisms of Rochefoucauld.

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Monday 17 October ’11

• From The Telegraph‘s review of Spielberg’s Tintin: “Even if Jamie Bell wasn’t so monotonously earnest as Tintin, he’d still look about as conscious as a bollard with a quiff.”

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Saturday 15 October ’11

• Two perfect diatribes: Jonathan Lethem on Norman Mailer in the Los Angeles Review of Books, William Deresiewicz on Harold Bloom in The New Republic [seems to require registration now].

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Friday 14 October ’11

• Will Self walks the diameter of London [requires registration at the London Review of Books — do it, people!].

• Designs to replace Britain’s electricity pylons.

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Thursday 13 October ’11

• The symphony, the novel, and the end of their affair due to one of them’s demise.

• The loss of play time to adult-directed activities is making children anxious and depressed.

• The inevitable and welcomed iPhone 4S teardown by the ifixit guys.

• Forced exercise is better for the brain than voluntary, and can help with Parkinson’s.

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Wednesday 12 October ’11

• Arstechnica, the iOS 5 review. Featuring game-changers Siri and the iCloud.

• Slideshow of Jerusalem’s Hotel Mamilla by Moshe Safdie. I want to visit.

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Monday 10 October ’11

• California’s handful of landmark houses.

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Sunday 9 October ’11

• Britain goes nuts for hummous.

• Billionaire Peter Thiel: “The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.” And when you’re finished with that, here it is again in more depth: “The Optimistic Thought Experiment”.

• Sober breakdown of the viability of the streaming music business model.

• Best of the Steve Jobs eulogies: John Siracusa, David Pogue. And one about his house. A favorable comparison with Thomas Edison.

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Saturday 8 October ’11

• Today: a world where big stuff can never get done.

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Thursday 6 October ’11

• Poignant Steve Jobs tale from the Gizmodo guy who got ahold of the iPhone 4 prototype.

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Sunday 2 October ’11

• Peggy Lee interprets Toots Thielemans “Making Whoopee”. Ms Lee again, warming up Dinah Shore. And a Disney documentary recreating the composing of “The Siamese Cat Song”.

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Saturday 1 October ’11

• Tony Blair, Middle East Quartet envoy, on Charlie Rose.

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Wednesday 28 September ’11

• Great collection of scientific images.

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Tuesday 27 September ’11

• In the wake of Israel’s grassroots protests, the Trajtenberg Committee has released its report. Extend free day care. Raise corporate income tax. Improve public transport. Set up credit bureaus. Break up the car leasing monopolies. More.

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Monday 26 September ’11

• Conrad Black, facing more jail time, remains irrepressible.

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Saturday 24 September ’11

• Oscar Handlin argued that American history is the history of immigration, which explains why America’s salvation lies in letting me in.

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Wednesday 21 September ’11

• Masterful summation by Herb Keinon of the significance of Obama’s speech to the UN on voting for a Palestinian state.

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Monday 19 September ’11

• Spengler: the “new, apocalyptic tone” in the Middle East is due to Egypt’s chronic unproductivity.

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Sunday 18 September ’11

• Ray Kappe.

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Saturday 17 September ’11

• My favorite FLLW site is Peter Beers’ Frank Lloyd Wright Road Trip. He’s stayed at the houses wherever you can, and done some benign architectural stalking where the residence remains private.

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Friday 16 September ’11

• Springtime from Hitler — the new face of the Arab Spring.

• Aluf Benn’s depressing wrap-up of Israel’s position today. Me, I think it’s not as bad as it looks; to be beleaguered and passive is also to remain above the fray, ignoring the hateful rhetoric as well-nigh meaningless by staying focused on the true hidden conflicts among the neighbors themselves. Iran, Turkey and to a lesser extent Egypt and Saudi Arabia each compete for the same pie of Middle East dominance, while Israel just wants to be left alone to be itself — a liberal democratic ideal that bestows true power, as Ataturk understood.

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Thursday 15 September ’11

• Architect Santiago Calatrava on his spectacular light rail bridge in Jerusalem.

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Wednesday 14 September ’11

• What the Palestinians want from the UN is not to exercise statehood but to be a “state under occupation” in order to legitimize escalation.

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Tuesday 13 September ’11

• Can you spot in this new McDonald’s commercial when they transition from the UK to the US?

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Friday 9 September ’11

• Did Ken Kesey save the world?

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Thursday 8 September ’11

• Walter Russell Mead: The slow motion collapse of the postal service, like some great prehistoric mastodon inexorably sinking into the La Brea Tarpits, deserves close attention.

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Sunday 4 September ’11

• Arab Spring = Kurdish Summer, argues David Eshel in his new blog covering Middle East affairs.

• New book on being childless in Israel.

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Friday 2 September ’11

• The Weekly Standard gives credit where credit is due to President Obama on Libya.

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Thursday 1 September ’11

• The strange story of Saif Qaddafi in Vanity Fair.

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Saturday 27 August ’11

• Stunningly good piece by Amir Oren in Haaretz on the British in Libya.

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Friday 26 August ’11

• CmdrTaco resigns.

• Krauthammer visits the new King memorial in Washington.

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Thursday 25 August ’11

• Despite Libya, what matters now is Syria, namely defeating Iran there.

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Tuesday 23 August ’11

• Recent home interviews with Ehud Ya’ari on Gaza and Syria.

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Monday 22 August ’11

• Warren Buffett’s “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich” article and discussing it on Charlie Rose.

• I’ve been subjected to the horror that is contemporary BBC Radio 1 lately, wherein they talk about the #1 single. I was skeptical, but it turns out the UK charts are real, and more singles are sold than ever.

• Only 10% of computer users know about ctrl-f. Pathetic.

• This profile of Avigdor Lieberman in Commentary Magazine provides a nice survey of current Israeli politics.

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Saturday 20 August ’11

• Harry Knowles lovin’ on the perfect Captain America: The First Avenger.

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Friday 19 August ’11

• Good Shabbes to everyone, and a song from and by Jeff Lynne.

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Thursday 18 August ’11

• My favorite movie reviewer, FlickPhilosopher Maryann Johanson, on Captain America, what I am about to see tonight.

• I’m a believer — decision fatigue.

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Thursday 11 August ’11

• The reprap, a self-replicating 3d-printer. Most mind-boggling thing ever.

• Text of David Cameron’s address to Parliament on the looting outbreak.

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Tuesday 9 August ’11

• Nancy Wake, WWII heroine, 98.

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Monday 8 August ’11

• “Gutted” by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books is a wonderful tour of the boyn (“the burn”) which unfortunately is interesting and relevant to me.

• On the rise and alleged fall of Los Angeles.

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Thursday 4 August ’11

• My guy Daniel Doron in the WSJ on Israel’s cottage cheese rebellion. Lots of sensible, knowledgeable input in the comments section as well, such as from Naif Mabat.

• Working remotely works.

• An investment manager’s view of the top 1%.

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Tuesday 2 August ’11

• I’m upset that Spaces is gone in Lion. Others concur.

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Sunday 24 July ’11

• John Siracusa’s must-read Lion review.

• Vivid, loving portrait of the beach at Brighton that gets in some of my own favorites, like Jack and Linda’s Smokehouse.

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Friday 22 July ’11

• Pew Research Center polls Muslims and Westerners on the same questions. Only 9% of Turks believe Arabs carried out 9/11.

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Monday 18 July ’11

• New York Times, with restrained glee, on the Murdoch scandal.

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Monday 11 July ’11

• Born between 1965 and 1980, we are the divorce generation.

• Libyans! Hamas has competition in the Sinai smuggling business.

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Thursday 30 June ’11

• Fox News slideshow from the 49th Paris Air Show.

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Friday 17 June ’11

• Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s begins his victory speech chillingly: “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.” What I believe is that many Turks are dissatisfied with being merely a nationstate. What a neighborhood.

• At the Gaza-Egypt crossing.

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Sunday 12 June ’11

• Al Schwimmer, founder of Israel Aircraft Industries, dies at 94. Haaretz obit.

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Wednesday 1 June ’11

• What’s there to disagree with in The Third Man, Elliott Abrams’ account of the Obama-Bibi-Abbas fracas.

• Environmentalism in microcosm in Why your dishwasher no longer works by Jonathan V. Last. The science more often than not isn’t science, the issue snowballs into a platform for political grandstanding, and nobody benefits from the massive waste.

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Monday 30 May ’11

• Walter Russell Mead waxes deep on Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. “…The people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul.”

• California: break it up?

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Saturday 28 May ’11

• The Gates Farewell Warning: America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.

• John Podhoretz judges the judge in “The Choice of Richard Goldstone”.

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Wednesday 25 May ’11

• Politico’s video of Netanyahu’s address to Congress, May 24, 2011 while at pmo.gov.il, the official text.

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Monday 23 May ’11

• If current fertility rates continue, Israel will have more 18-24-year-olds than either Iran or Turkey by 2085.

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Saturday 21 May ’11

• On George Mitchell’s retirement: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not and was never comparable to Northern Ireland.

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Monday 16 May ’11

• One persuasive theory: Microsoft is only buying Skype to stop Google from doing so.

• All good things come to those who wait (and spend $250m). The iconic Hiriya garbage dump is set to become Ariel Sharon Park.

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Monday 9 May ’11

• Bless the internets. Great explanatory essay on dishwashers on epinions.

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Sunday 8 May ’11

• Ashton Kutcher’s exceedingly nice house is for sale. Lots of wood.

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Friday 29 April ’11

• This repeated lunge for the sour spot — WRM on the Obama presidency.

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Wednesday 27 April ’11

• Syria’s about to join the UN Human Rights Council. Well.

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Tuesday 26 April ’11

• Barry Rubin cuts to the chase re prospects for success in the Syrian uprising compared to Egypt, Libya, etc.

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Monday 25 April ’11

• An interview with the towering Kobi Oz sitting somewhere at Rothschild.

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Thursday 21 April ’11

• Yet another incredible AAPL quarter.

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Friday 15 April ’11

• Behold, “The Book of Highdef” as told by Eric D. Snider.

• Some inside baseball on what happens when AOL buys your client.

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Thursday 14 April ’11

• On forming a new software startup, how to allocate ownership fairly?

• Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, waxes serious on what education should really be for most of us.

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Wednesday 13 April ’11

• Why LinkedIn is more valuable than Facebook.

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Tuesday 12 April ’11

• GAGA-1, a hobby balloon satellite.

• O reason not the need — give us the Immersive Cocoon.

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Monday 11 April ’11

• A primer by an Egyptian liberal on how to achieve at least something in the upcoming elections.

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Saturday 9 April ’11

• More than 60% of Egyptians want to maintain the peace treaty with Israel.

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Friday 8 April ’11

• “On the problems besetting the revamp of the plaza around Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater.

• The perfect push-up, in detail.

• “Self-Taught Programmers vs CS-Educated Programmers” rings true and echoes out to education in general.

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Thursday 7 April ’11

• Controlling your cursor with your mind is no longer science fiction.

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Thursday 31 March ’11

• Regarding Syria, Israel should arm the Kurds.

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Wednesday 30 March ’11

• Why an iPad? Seth Godin explains.

• Why the new Skype 5 for OS X sucks and how to switch back to the previous version.

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Tuesday 29 March ’11

• A woman of a certain age, who’s never used a computer before, reviews her new iPad.

• Answers to this year’s question from The Edge: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?

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Sunday 27 March ’11

• Festo’s SmartBird: a robotic flying seagull.

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Saturday 26 March ’11

• The telephone retreats.

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Friday 25 March ’11

• Libya, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia: all artificial states that could disintegrate.

• Visual breakdown of The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera (requires Flash).

• Jeffrey Goldberg: Dear Reuters, You Must Be Kidding.

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Saturday 19 March ’11

• What is the $6b cut in the US budget in terms of a Big Mac meal?

• Wired‘s profile of Larry Page, now Google’s CEO.

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Thursday 17 March ’11

• Until the 1980s, Qaddafi improved life for Libyans.

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Wednesday 9 March ’11

• Shatner wakes up the Discovery astronauts.

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Sunday 6 March ’11

• Harvard professor of public policy Robert Putnam reflects on his 2007 desert encounter with Gadhafi.

• Warren Buffett’s latest Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders.

• A donut without a hole is a danish. “Secret of the Sabbath“ by Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz in Azure.

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Thursday 3 March ’11

• Cool — a view of the final Space Shuttle launch from a nearby passenger plane (2:07).

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Wednesday 2 March ’11

• The Kleptones “Come Again”.

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Monday 28 February ’11

• Hitchens upbraids Obama on Libya.

• Cute wisdom on why you’re not married.

• An insightful day at the museum.

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Tuesday 22 February ’11

• Latter-year recreations of childhood photos. Wondrous.

• On being defeated at Jeopardy by a computer.

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Thursday 17 February ’11

• An explosion of James Bond fun and some copycats 1, 2, 3, 4

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Saturday 12 February ’11

• A valuable rant against gourmands/gluttons.

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Friday 11 February ’11

• Cool, Tel Aviv.

• The fabulously-named economist Warwick Lightfoot deftly and dispassionately fingers Britain’s underlying problem: her bloated and overpaid public sector.

• Victor Davis Hanson dissects the shambles that has been the Obama administration’s reaction to the protests in Egypt.

.....

Thursday 10 February ’11

• Michael Barone celebrates Ronald Reagan’s centenary.

.....

Wednesday 9 February ’11

• John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp, explains why we’re going to be okay.

.....

Monday 31 January ’11

• Barry Rubin comes down unequivocally on supporting the Egyptian regime.

• Trump blasts Obama. Very breezy, very crazy, very on the ball.

.....

Saturday 29 January ’11

• Fouad Ajami explains why they hate Mubarak:
  Egypt is not naturally a dictatorship.

.....

Friday 21 January ’11

• The great Kobi Oz on his development as an artist.

.....

Tuesday 18 January ’11

• The case for an engaged USA, elementally argued by Robert Kagan. “The danger, as always, is that we don’t even realize the benefits…”

• Towards a more balanced personal future.

.....

Sunday 16 January ’11

• New York Times feature on Stuxnet.

.....

Friday 14 January ’11

• The fault line runs between George Mitchell and Dennis Ross.

• On solitude and leadership, the Nunnian combination.

• The New Yorker on pudding.

.....

Thursday 13 January ’11

• Lebanese government collapses in run-up to Hariri assassination report.

.....

Wednesday 12 January ’11

• Istanbul, very open city.

.....

Thursday 16 December ’10

• Liberalism 5.0.

• Reuters special report: Is America the sick man of the globe?

.....

Saturday 30 October ’10

• The hills are still alive: Sound of Music cast sings Edelweiss.

.....

Thursday 21 October ’10

• Civilization V is out, at least for the PC. It’s a game of never really arriving.

.....

Friday 15 October ’10

• Yes, cancer is new.

• Scully on Jobs.

• Bashing the makers of ExpressionEngine: Kenny Meyers’ Plea To EllisLab and Veerle Pieters breaking ranks.

.....

Thursday 7 October ’10

• A reminder of Benjamin Franklin’s folksy but wise wisdom.

.....

Wednesday 6 October ’10

• Orson Welles, delightful on politics and art.

• On the coming passing of North Korea.

.....

Monday 4 October ’10

• Engaging.net’s powerful ExpressionEngine plugin External Entries is featured in an article by Aaron Lax at Paper Tiger.

.....

Sunday 3 October ’10

• Animals on the London Underground — awesome!

.....

Saturday 2 October ’10

• Mike Rowe explicates the war on work — the cultural “marginalization of lots and lots of jobs”.

.....

Monday 27 September ’10

• My goodness: a long juicy New Yorker piece on David Grossman.

.....

Monday 20 September ’10

• John Bolton on the Obama Administration at the UN.

• The Avatar pony-tail conceit: it is our unique affinity with other species that makes us most human.

• On America’s demographic decline.

.....

Thursday 9 September ’10

• Tony Blair says to Charlie Rose the unsayable, that the fundamental problem is not terror, not al-Qaida, but a belief among Muslims that the West is hostile.

• The lovely John F. Burns revisits Iraq with Charlie Rose.

.....

Monday 6 September ’10

• Discussing disgusting, the new psychological field.

• A careful analysis on the prospects of the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

.....

Saturday 4 September ’10

• David Brooks plays what if with the Obama term.

• Interview with Shatner including video. Fine.

.....

Wednesday 1 September ’10

• Aluf Benn’s pitch-perfect response to the Israeli soldier Facebook photos scandal

• January Jones interview. With video. And she’s even more mesmerising than Betty Draper.

.....

Tuesday 31 August ’10

• Walter Russell Mead welcomes this incoming college class with some wise words.

.....

Monday 30 August ’10

• At last, some vintage Holidays in Hell P. J. O’Rourke with 72 hours in Afghanistan.

.....

Friday 27 August ’10

• The kiln, Korea’s sauna.

• The little people in America have proven so disappointing lately.

.....

Thursday 26 August ’10

• Michael J Totten and Jonathan Spyer talk Middle East.

.....

Wednesday 25 August ’10

• Dog on a swing (1:57).

• The Joseph Epstein media diet.

.....

Tuesday 24 August ’10

• David Brooks deftly diagnoses America.

• The Persians’ problem: Iran or Islam?

.....

Monday 23 August ’10

• Video of Christopher Hitchens with the imposing Jeffrey Goldberg.

.....

Friday 20 August ’10

• On the emerging emerging adulthood.

.....

Monday 16 August ’10

• Is the derangement spreading Stateside?
  Harvard University fund sells all Israel holdings. Update: not.

.....

Friday 13 August ’10

• Discussing a new Tel Aviv tourist project, what passes as knowing zeitgeist commentary in Hebrew reads like bitter flabby drivel in English.

• Cool — Jon Longnecker praises Engaging.net’s Nearby Entries in the first episode (at about 4:10) of their “Kick Awesome Show”!

.....

Saturday 7 August ’10

• Saxondale tells The Sun how it is — an in-character interview.

.....

Friday 6 August ’10

• Salient points on how Reagan differs from the common conception of him, mainly that he almost never utilized the US military.

.....

Tuesday 3 August ’10

• I’m loving inertial scrolling on my MacBook Pro. Thanks, Apple.

.....

Monday 2 August ’10

• Beware, Dictionary.com.

• Efraim Karsh: The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace…

• “It’s a hard world for poets,” decries the protagonist of this great NYT piece on the Italian economy.

.....

Tuesday 27 July ’10

• The Luftwaffe’s in Israel, training to fly Heron drones in Afghanistan.

• In Turkey, Cameron calls Gaza a ‘prison camp’. Aha. There goes some moral credibility — that was quick.

.....

Monday 26 July ’10

• On the Case of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer by a formerly admiring former student.

.....

Saturday 24 July ’10

• A graduate moves to India for work. That ain’t America.

• Another excellent piece by Andy Rutledge, an admonition/checklist for being a professional designer/developer.

.....

Wednesday 21 July ’10

• Russell Beattie praises tablet computing as the future for most of us.

.....

Tuesday 20 July ’10

• Both the BBC and Fox news web sites have recently been redesigned, with the BBC losing its looks and Fox getting neat and serious.

.....

Monday 19 July ’10

• jQuery diagramming with jsPlumb — cool.

• I’ve never linked to Frank Rich, but this reminder of Mel Gibson’s The Passion is stimulating.

• Ruth Lapidoth, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University, on the legalities of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. Note how long the Turks had Gaza: 400 years — far far longer than anyone else around today.

.....

Monday 12 July ’10

• Another wonderful blog post by Walter Russell Mead, this time hoping that the blogosphere find a not-so-distant mirror in 18th-century London.

• Why Caucasians are better swimmers, Negros are better runners: torso length.

.....

Sunday 11 July ’10

• Racism is about appearance and the material; anti-Semitism is abstract and about the conspiracy.

.....

Wednesday 7 July ’10

• Google argues that its mobile YouTube site is better than its YouTube iPhone app.

.....

Tuesday 6 July ’10

• Another gem from Haaretz’s Aluf Benn, comparing Netanyahu’s situation to Churchill’s. Amazing that this same newspaper publishes the idiotic Yoel Marcus.

• Aluf Benn, probably Israel’s best columnist, compares Israel and Turkey.

• Bret and the gay rights defence of Israel.

• Lee as one of the SC Wholly Rollers opening for the Blues Traveler with Sista Otis in Myrtle Beach.

.....

Friday 2 July ’10

• Jakob Nielsen tests reading usability on the iPad and Kindle and reports that they’re almost as good as reading on paper. People didn’t like reading on PCs — it reminded them of work.

• Falling out of love with the iPad. None of this surprises me.

.....

Wednesday 30 June ’10

• Wow, icons made entirely in CSS3 (currently Safari, Chrome only).

• Short film created entirely on the iPhone 4.

.....

Monday 28 June ’10

• A day in the early life of an iPhone 4.

.....

Wednesday 23 June ’10

• Tom Friedman Turkey talk at his best: insightful and pithy. He quotes an academic there: “Turkey is not a bridge. It’s a center.” This exactly is the Turkey problem: they think they are the center of something larger than themselves.

.....

Tuesday 8 June ’10

• It’s ominous. Spengler reflects on Turkey.

• Could Americans get yob disease? (Comments are more insightful than the article itself.)

.....

Sunday 23 May ’10

• Typical UK-based coverage: Jewish settlements have “eaten vast tracts” of a “only a sliver of occupied land”. How does this work?

.....

Sunday 16 May ’10

• The $425m water desalination plant at Hadera is the world’s largest using reverse osmosis technology. Peee!

.....

Friday 14 May ’10

• Complete common sense by Hussein Ibish on the Israeli & Palestinian future.

• Walter Russell Mead is sanguine about long-term prospects after a visit to Israel.

.....

Tuesday 11 May ’10

• MarsEdit 3.0 now has custom fields. Now to deploy for all clients running ExpressionEngine (er, that’s everyone).

.....

Saturday 24 April ’10

• Good reminder for how to estimate projects.

.....

Thursday 22 April ’10

• Holy operating system, AAPL > MSFT today! Oops, no it isn’t.

.....

Wednesday 21 April ’10

• Israeli study on shvitzing, ie, boasting.

.....

Saturday 17 April ’10

• On second thoughts, let’s not go to Camelot, said Captain Kirk. It is a silly place.

.....

Tuesday 13 April ’10

• “Hash browns, yes or no?” “Never. They’re American.” On the English breakfast and thereby Britain itself.

• Netanyahu’s Yom HaShoah speech.

• Andy Rutledge on Lies, Deception, and Subcontracting.

.....

Monday 12 April ’10

• Nicely written Bikram 60-day challenge piece at oprah.com.

.....

Saturday 10 April ’10

• Been a long time since linking to a Caroline Glick piece — she got shrill — but this one, on King Abdullah’s recent speech, is good.

• Centrifuge for a lava lamp.

.....

Friday 9 April ’10

• Fisking Petraeus.

• WRM on London’s manure panic and its contemporary equivalent.

.....

Monday 5 April ’10

• Adam Engst: “The iPad becomes the app you’re using… if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.”

• Video surveying Magazines on the iPad such as Time, GQ, PopSci. Is this any improvement over my Firefox? What I want an iPad for is games and maybe books, not magazines.

• Why Cory Doctorow won’t buy an iPad.

.....

Sunday 4 April ’10

• MuscleNerd jailbreaks iPad.

• WRM coins a classical term, Lycabettus, for one’s own personal vantage point.

• iPad teardown with high-res shots.

.....

Thursday 1 April ’10

• Another lovely end-of-our dog piece by Lily Burana.

.....

Monday 29 March ’10

• Israel-Iran war games at the Saban Center. Game simulation — such a powerful way to think.

.....

Saturday 27 March ’10

• Robert Kagan expounds dispassionately on the Obama Administration’s unhinged approach to world affairs.

.....

Monday 22 March ’10

• Watching Michael Oren trying to smooth things over on Charlie Rose, one wonders who’s the grown-ups at the moment; hint, it’s not the superpower.

.....

Thursday 18 March ’10

• Finally, the piece of news I’ve been after, and it comes from Yossi Klein-Halevi in TNR“: According to an Israel Radio poll on March 16, 62% of Israelis blame the Obama administration for the crisis, while 20% blame Netanyahu. (Another 17% blame Shas leader Eli Yishai.)

• Just trying Zen Coding in TextMate. Looks like a great idea, hope it becomes a habit.

.....

Saturday 13 March ’10

• Surprising whirlwind of an article on Afghanistan by national treasure Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic. Surely the world’s greatest magazine?

.....

Thursday 11 March ’10

• As I suspected, it looks like it’s all going to be previously on 24.

.....

Tuesday 9 March ’10

• Wow, WRM goes the whole hog on Israel-bashing as anti-Semitism. Seismic, man.

.....

Monday 8 March ’10

• The harsh inner life of demigod Dudley.

.....

Thursday 4 March ’10

• JCPA: The Iranian regime will indeed collapse? within the decade.

.....

Monday 1 March ’10

• More prophesy from A Clockwork Orange.

.....

Monday 22 February ’10

• 10 good reasons to avoid talking on the phone, by Oatmeal.

.....

Saturday 20 February ’10

• Nice one on boredom, both lousy and perfect.

.....

Thursday 18 February ’10

• More and more of OpinionJournal goes behind the paywall. Personally I think it’s the right move, because what’s there to lose? If we won’t pay, the business was over anyway. And my bet is we will.

.....

Tuesday 16 February ’10

• Macworld Expo 2010 Best of Show.

.....

Sunday 14 February ’10

• Excellent piece of history by Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel, on settlements. Excellent because specific details affect the reader’s general beliefs.

.....

Thursday 11 February ’10

• China overtakes Germany as largest exporter.

• Israel survey: domestic bliss.

.....

Tuesday 9 February ’10

• America’s housing bubble was the last gasp of suburbanism. In the information age, we need to get back to the cities.

• Unemployment is society’s greatest ravager, and in the USA it will stay high, The Atlantic reports.

• The ‘Dead in academia.

.....

Monday 8 February ’10

• On chatroulette.com.

• Zeldman say be early.

• Rep. Paul Ryan’s
  Roadmap for the American Future.

.....

Tuesday 2 February ’10

• Russell Beattie: What we really wanted was a MacPad not an iPad.

.....

Sunday 31 January ’10

• Where Should I Eat? Fast Food Edition. Excellent flowchart.

.....

Saturday 30 January ’10

• Sikuli, ingenious GUI scripting. Definitely going to try it.

• Walter Russell Mead’s blue paradigm of the post-war American system.

.....

Tuesday 26 January ’10

• The main problem for America now, suggests Walter Russell Mead, is that the social class that manages and fosters change is itself now for the first time being undermined by change.

• Dr Mercola’s most in-depth article ever. Here’s the skinny on high fructose corn syrup.

• Early evolution may have proceeded through a series of stages before the Darwinian form emerged.

• This video of a tablet mockup makes me horny at last for a tablet computer. I’m excited for tomorrow’s Apple announcement. Guess I’ll be standing in line to buy one as well.

• A Little Less Conversation, says Joel Spolsy.

• Fake Steve Jobs pens the most insightful piece I’ve read on Google’s complaints vis-a-vis China.

• Wonderful blog, Letters of Note, exactly what you hope it’ll be.

.....

Monday 25 January ’10

• Gallup demonstrates how the USA really is getting more polarized.

.....

Sunday 24 January ’10

• Stephen M. Walt’s latest on Israel. This guy reads like Chomsky. “Israel’s self-destructive land grab… most hard-line government in Israeli history… if Israel preferred peace to land… Netanyahu’s intransigence… recalcitrant client… carve up the West Bank and make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible… increasingly becomes an apartheid state… might help give al Qaeda a new lease on life… a poor embodiment of their own values… greater risk of anti-American terrorism.” Still, at least he’s “a long-time supporter of Israel’s existence.” That’s a relief.

• Fine interview (discount the interviewer) with wise elder statesman Gary Sick on Iran.

• Hypercritical by John Siracusa, or, The Tao of Editing.

• Early vs late risers. Proactive/conscientious vs extroverted, pessimistic and creative.

• To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Elliott Abrams on Israel. On boycotts, Europeans’ “prejudices against the Jewish state are unconquerable.” On whether war crimes were in fact committed in Gaza, the main mistake was not going in sooner. Refreshingly robust.

• Ebert’s best films of the decade.

.....

Friday 22 January ’10

• A test of input device speed for a 221-word passage.

• On moving forward smartly on Iran. Robert D. Kaplan in The Atlantic (be like Reagan). James K. Glassman in The Wall Street Journal (a serious plan). And the participants in a Harvard Kennedy School diplomacy wargame with Iran talk to Charlie Rose: Gary Sick, Graham Allison, Nicholas Burns and Ehud Eiran.

• James Fallows on China’s complex internet censorship.

.....

Thursday 21 January ’10

• Crazy-ass neo-Nazi review of Inglourious Basterds.

• The Mini Countryman.

.....

Monday 18 January ’10

• George Mitchell with Charlie Rose for 52 whole minutes on the current Israeli-Palestinian situation. Great man… A few days later Elliott Abrams responds.

.....

Sunday 17 January ’10

• Satan’s open letter to Pat Robertson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as transcribed by Lily Coyle.

.....

Wednesday 13 January ’10

• Why Jews hate Palin.

• Evelyn Gordon in Commentary on Israel since Oslo: “The desperate pursuit of peace is not the solution but the problem”.

.....

Thursday 7 January ’10

• Wow, everyone’s gonna be reading this one. Michael Kinsley demolishes the desiccated style endemic to big media reporting.

• Three cheers for the Vintage Ad Browser.

• A nice big juicy essay by James Fallows on America right now. To muddle through — “That is the bravest and best choice for us now.”

• Doing enterprise wrong.

.....

Wednesday 6 January ’10

• Over at The Atlantic, this is perhaps the piece and subsequent conversation in the comments on applying the Israeli airport security method in the USA. “I’d say, as a generalization, screeners here possess above-average intelligence, whereas your average TSA screener seems to be a working stiff.” Yes, and working stiff seems an overstatement.

.....

Tuesday 5 January ’10

• Om Malik’s list of 10 articles on the art of the startup.

• A Killer Collection of Global CSS Reset Styles.

• leogeo.com, a veritable museum of Flash loveliness.

• Just discovered Kuler by Adobe. Nice.

.....

Sunday 3 January ’10

• David Brooks’ Sidney Awards for great online essays.

.....

Saturday 2 January ’10

• A real essay on the internet, the sweeping Keeping America’s Edge by Jim Manzi in issue 2 of National Affairs.

.....

Friday 25 December ’09

• 200 years that changed the world, a fascinating 5-minute video that feels like 2 minutes.

.....

Thursday 24 December ’09

• Web fonts are coming.

• RGBA, the web’s new method for color.

.....

Wednesday 23 December ’09

• Top (and bottom) 10 dog breeds for intelligence. A slideshow.

.....

Monday 21 December ’09

• Fabulous, erudite, comical, scathing review of the first Star Wars prequel.

• Browser Pong. Somebody was smokin’ somethin’.

• Bored? Doodling does help.

.....

Thursday 17 December ’09

• While it works, PayPal is nice and cheap, but if it doesn’t work, you are royally screwed.

• The noughties, a sinister death cult.

• The “Building my website with ExpressionEngine” song.

.....

Saturday 12 December ’09

• The internet is... any number of silly things.

• Tour-de-force rant to AT&T by Fake Steve. Fake Steve Jobs 2012!

.....

Wednesday 9 December ’09

• Web giants Zeldman and Dean Allen go head-to-head regarding the end of favrd (see Allen’s statement in the comments).

• Daniel Henninger points out the real danger of global warning/climate change, namely, its wrecking of science.

.....

Monday 7 December ’09

• Chewing gum relieves stress.

.....

Sunday 6 December ’09

• Try Ommwriter, the enlightened text editor. Mac only, obviously.

• British plugs, rethought. Behold, the genius.

.....

Friday 4 December ’09

• Brighton to Victoria on the train for £3. I’ve done it, though had to enjoy a veggie English Breakfast at Victoria’s Wetherspoone’s while waiting for London to open.

• Andy Rutledge wisely instructs us that when calculating the hours required to do a job, the nature of the client is a real factor.

.....

Tuesday 1 December ’09

• Bill Clinton tells us what’s up and what to read. Interesting, though his recommending Paul Krugman, who seems to me unfailingly wrong about everything, stands as a warning.

• The Cameron Way: What American conservatives should learn from the British Tory leader, by Joseph Loconte in National Review.

.....

Monday 23 November ’09

• If the credit crisis was the beginning of the end of global warming/climate change, this is the middle: searchable hacked emails.

.....

Saturday 21 November ’09

• However yawns arise, and whatever they signify, such a spontaneous copying response to a second person’s signal of mood is an unmistakable sign of empathy.

.....

Thursday 19 November ’09

• The Scroll Clock. I love this!

.....

Friday 13 November ’09

• Participants who made snap judgments of female sexual orientation were significantly more accurate than participants who made thoughtful and deliberated judgments.

.....

Monday 9 November ’09

• Elliott Abrams encapsulates a year of the Obama Administration on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It ain’t pretty, but it does have the merit of being so feckless as to be irrelevant, thereby not interfering with the real progress on the ground.

.....

Friday 6 November ’09

• The Voice of Peace, back Nov 7 after 15 years!

.....

Tuesday 3 November ’09

• What’s going on in Pakistan? Fred Kagan provides an overview.

• It’s about helping your users become awesome though she does use the word “awesome” awesomely often.

• Ein brira; Yossi Klein Halevi reports how it is in Israel around the dinner table vis-a-vis attacking Iran.

.....

Saturday 31 October ’09

• Language extinction – Fall/full-McWhorter-Fall-2009.html, a case for not getting too upset by.

• On email. “…when correspondents have a difference of opinion, it usually makes matters worse. It creates a lot of busywork. It is responsible for the emoticon.”

• Of monsters. A nice Sunday-morning read. “The monster concept is still extremely useful, and it’s a permanent player in the moral imagination because human vulnerability is permanent.”

.....

Friday 30 October ’09

• The talks at EECI2009 as captured by Matthew Pennell.

.....

Wednesday 21 October ’09

• With technology, our relationship to culture becomes less like a long-distance romance and more like marriage.

.....

Tuesday 20 October ’09

• Some quickly digestible nuggets of imperial wisdom from Byzantium, as channelled by Edward Luttwak in Foreign Policy.

.....

Monday 19 October ’09

• The not only brilliant but also it turns out delightful Rick Ellis, CEO of EllisLab, gives a 20-minute interview.

• Raphaël is a JavaScript library for vector graphics. I think we’ll be pursuing this.

.....

Saturday 17 October ’09

• Caroline Glick on how Turkey was lost. She blames the Bush Administration and I have to sadly agree; their eagerness to see liberalism and democracy within Islam vitiated liberalism and democracy within Turkey.

.....

Thursday 15 October ’09

• It’s madness but persuasive: Why Russia is Not Afraid of an Iranian Bomb by Boris Morozov.

.....

Tuesday 13 October ’09

• Powazek argues that SEO is pointless but there are some wise comments to his post that persuasively contradict him.

.....

Sunday 11 October ’09

• Paul Wolfowitz speaks! The Realist is not pragmatic, he argues. “…ignoring the nature of states is to ignore a fundamental reality that has a huge bearing on the U.S. national interest. To do so is not realistic. It is dogmatic or even ideological.”

• Boogie Ayalon articulates the bottom-up approach to the Israel/Palestinian conflict.

.....

Friday 9 October ’09

• In praise of folly — a reminder.

• The authoritative Mad Men blog, Basket of Kisses, interviews Elisabeth Moss, AKA Peggy Olsen.

• Lileks riffs on Mad Men. “If you don’t watch Mad Men, and you think it’s some Austin-Powers view of the sixties full of madcap over-the-top cultural schtick – they’re smoking, indoors! They’re drinking, at noon! No.”

.....

Sunday 4 October ’09

• Netanyahu, on the eve of his UN speech, mature, coherent, persuasive on Charlie Rose.

.....

Thursday 24 September ’09

• Looks cool: The ExpressionEngine control panel on your iPhone. Clients, do you want it?

.....

Wednesday 16 September ’09

• Patrick Swayze, 1953-2009, with Chris Farley auditioning at SNL for Chippendales.

.....

Friday 11 September ’09

• I resist responding to RFPs (request for proposals) and have always presumed it’s due to vices like laziness. But Andy Rutledge has forged an essay out of this inchoate dislike and explained why RFPS are unsuitable for hiring web agencies.

.....

Tuesday 8 September ’09

• Mailer reluctantly revisited. For the most part I agree with this withering skewering, but it amateurishly omits some of his best stuff, the style of his pieces for The Village Voice.

.....

Monday 7 September ’09

• Aaron’s brother Mischa on his cousin’s new downtown LA restaurant, The Gorbals.

• Russell Beattie exhaustively compares mobile browsers. I’m pleased to see that the browser I use on my n95, Opera Mini, fares favorably.

.....

Sunday 30 August ’09

• Services, new and improved in Snow Leopard.

• Craigslist: corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features.

.....

Thursday 27 August ’09

• If ever the US has been close to achieving potentially terminal self-marginalization in the Middle East, it is now, under Obama. By Michael Young, opinion editor, Lebanon’s Daily Star.

.....

Tuesday 25 August ’09

• Iranian missile technology is developing impressively, Dore Gold’s Jerusalem Center reports.

• Spengler explains the “hopeless, but not serious” quip about the situation of the Palestinians.

.....

Monday 24 August ’09

• Spengler explains the “hopeless, but not serious” quip about the situation of the Palestinians.

.....

Sunday 16 August ’09

• The world’s best ever 5 minutes of stand-up? Richard Pryor in the African Jungle.

.....

Friday 14 August ’09

• Reviews of Aaron Livingstone’s cousin Ilan Hall’s new restaurant in downtown LA, The Gorbals, at Eater LA and Food GPS. Daniel Sanders and Mischa Livingstone were there. It’s just near Daniel’s place.

• Irit’s a fan. A survey of books marking the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death.

• A Missouri farmer stridently defends industrial farming.

• Bad satnav, bad.

.....

Monday 10 August ’09

• Sharper in style than his dad, John Podhoretz slices open Obama’s new “honest” Israel policy.

.....

Wednesday 5 August ’09

• Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes. Video of TED talk.

• Paul Romer’s radical idea: Charter cities. Wow.

• Lovely punchy little essay presenting a fresh point of view on divorce. In the middle of a good life, husband says, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.” What to do?

• Listen to or watch this account of a young US Marine impaled with a live missile, and how his colleagues and doctors risked their own lives to remove it.

.....

Tuesday 4 August ’09

• Yossi Klein-Halevi has words for the Obama Administration regarding its Middle East attitudes and policies.

• How to sign off an email?

.....

Friday 31 July ’09

• EasyJet begins Luton-Tel Aviv flights in November, 2009. With a suitcase, the all-inclusive cost of a return flight is £135, less than half of current prices!

.....

Thursday 30 July ’09

• With Bing, Project Natal and Windows 7, Microsoft has apparently turned the corner.

.....

Tuesday 28 July ’09

• Shatner recites Palin’s resignation speech, Shatner-style.

• This shallow, poorly-edited, panegyric to contemporary Israel is unworthy of The Weekly Standard.

.....

Sunday 26 July ’09

• How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans.

• Living without money.

• “The very openness and optimism we love about Americans has a credulous and gullible obverse side.” Stephen Fry presents “America’s Place in the World”, The Spectator Lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, London, April 30th, 2009.

.....

Tuesday 7 July ’09

• Bret notes that McNamara serves as the perfect cautionary tale for the Obama White House.

.....

Sunday 5 July ’09

• Peter Berokowitz outlines the likely repercussions of an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Nothing too earth-shattering actually.

.....

Saturday 4 July ’09

• Interview with the guys behind the wonderful closing credits for WALL•E.

.....

Tuesday 30 June ’09

• John Podhoretz on Year One: he’s not hugely impressed with this one either, but though I liked it and was glad to see it in the cinema, I guess he’s right.

.....

Thursday 25 June ’09

• The New York Times reviews the latest revival of Waiting for Godot.

.....

Tuesday 23 June ’09

• The story of the writing of 1984.

.....

Monday 22 June ’09

• Old dogs are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

.....

Sunday 21 June ’09

• David Brooks writes the first beautiful prose on the Iranian protests — see paragraphs 3 and 4. And it stays lyrical as well as wise. Brooks’s best ever?

• I have to say, Tom Friedman’s column on Iran sounds like a presidential speech.

• Tirade against Britain by Iran’s foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki. The mid-sized Satan?

• Valuable lessons learned in 4 nasty days at Deep Springs College [via Brian]. I was there for 9 months and didn’t get it as clearly as the author does.

.....

Saturday 20 June ’09

• Withering observations on Obama’s lukewarm reaction to events in Iran by William Kristol (Obama as “resolutely irresolute”) and Fred Barnes (rejecting Obama’s “false choices” meme).

• “Unless Mousavi withdraws and leads his followers in a renewed quietist retreat,” writes Reuel Marc Gerecht, “the Islamic revolution, which shook the Muslim world 30 years ago, will now become either a real laboratory of democracy or a crude and violent dictatorship that might rival the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria in its savagery. Either outcome would be momentous.”

.....

Thursday 18 June ’09

• “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”. Seriously, why marry, if it’s less stable — as it is in the USA — than not doing so?

• Caddyshack is a Marx Bros movie, Ramis explains.

.....

Monday 15 June ’09

• Sometimes it just works. Charlie Rose with the Broadway cast of Waiting for Godot: Nathan Lane, John Goodman, Bill Irwin and John Glover.

• Krauthammer tells it like it is on the Obama Cairo speech: cheap condescension, moral abdication and ambivalence towards the country he leads.

.....

Saturday 13 June ’09

• John Bolton lists Iran’s likely responses to an Israeli attack. Plus: he says “quantum of solace”!

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Thursday 4 June ’09

• The Office, UK vs US.

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Monday 1 June ’09

• Yep, John Podhoretz wasn’t too impressed with Star Trek either.

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Sunday 31 May ’09

• Joe Lieberman points out the unprecedented convergence of concerns about Iran among Arabs and Israelis alike — and that some of the strongest alliances in history have been forged among old antagonists when confronted by a new, common threat.

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Tuesday 19 May ’09

• Cool. Bret’s fluid and languid take on Netanyahu’s visit with Obama — and Bret on Charlie Rose!

• Fred Barnes seems to be growing consistently to the right of Charles Krauthammer in this transcript of their reactions on Fox News’ Special Report to the first Obama/Netanyahu meeting.

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Saturday 9 May ’09

• Big piece on Israel by an Australian.

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Thursday 7 May ’09

• Subways to scale. [via Subtraction]

• JJ Abrahms on Charlie Rose. Charlie at 28:20: “Lost. People that I know love it, love it, love it.”

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Sunday 3 May ’09

• Fascinating, brief, accessible article on bone in nytimes/science. Wish nytimes.com had a donations box.

• Chic, a definition.

• Cool bendy Manhattan map.

.....

Wednesday 29 April ’09

• Theodore Dalrymple on J. G. Ballard.

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Tuesday 28 April ’09

• Interview with Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new Foreign Minister.

• Spengler’s first as David P Goldman, lamenting what seems the end of Anglo-Saxon dominance.

• Christopher Buckley on losing Mum and Pup.

.....

Monday 27 April ’09

• Brief recent photo essay of North Korea by the brave Tomas van Houtryve.

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Sunday 26 April ’09

• On the bullying of and subsequent sad decline of the SAT. Yet another story of American self-immolation.

• Mark Steyn isn’t even trying to be funny any more. In “The End of the World as We Know It”= he expresses what I’m thinking and feeling, that we’re in deep trouble because Americans voted impetuously and like spoilt children for a Feelgood o’Balma that’s going to stop feeling good mighty fast as Americans realize that given the choice, and if you can’t have both, it is indeed better to be feared than loved — and in America’s case, better for everyone.

.....

Saturday 25 April ’09

• Look at these fucking hipsters — fun photoblog.

• Sarzkozy seems to be a failure.

• Unemployment in Spain has reached 17.4%.

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Friday 24 April ’09

• The Atlantic finally realizes that maybe the Palestinians don’t really want a state. But see the weasel-words at the end designed to keep this radical position within the pale of polite society/nonsense.

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Tuesday 21 April ’09

• Shots of Disney’s recycling of Snow White in various subsequent films.

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Sunday 19 April ’09

• Spengler, revealed.

• Apart from his tiresome and overly-revealing reference in every piece to Iraq as a disaster — which, fair enough, most hacks do — John Lancaster’s London Review of Books pieces make a fun collection.

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Friday 17 April ’09

• A “a reticence-free zone”: wow, David Brooks turns his laser vision to Israel, and let me tell you something habibi he is nobody’s frier. Now pass me that Fizzy Bubalech.

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Thursday 16 April ’09

• A tantalizing glimpse into the mindset of the Germans during the Final Solution — this book review rollicks along.

• Dharma Initiative magazine ads circa 1977.

• If we could see as a telescope.

• Lego battleship Yamato.

• Michael Caine easy, free, articulate and enthusiastic on Charlie Rose.

.....

Monday 13 April ’09

• The title of Krauthammer’s latest, “It’s Your Country Too, Mr President”, seems borderline treasonous. (Not that I don’t agree.)

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Sunday 12 April ’09

• The Telegraph and The Times on Heston Blumenthal’s Little Chef at Popham.

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Thursday 9 April ’09

• James Taranto is on fire today, fisking Roger Cohen

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Sunday 5 April ’09

• Valery Gergiev takes the London Symphony Orchestra on tour to the USA doing Prokofiev.

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Wednesday 1 April ’09

• Watching Watchmen. For: Ebert (wants to see again), Travers. Against, Scott (withering), Podhoretz.

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Sunday 22 March ’09

• “Tough Times in EUtopia”: a pessimistic survey in The Weekly Standard on how Europe is faring up in the financial crisis.

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Saturday 21 March ’09

• Condi Rice, for the hour, on Charlie Rose. What a babe at 54. “The United States is too big a country, too important a country, too gracious a country to have permanent enemies.”

• “”“Women and GTD; Is There a Problem?” at GTD Times”:http://www.gtdtimes.com/2009/03/20/women-and-gtd-is-there-a-problem/

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Thursday 19 March ’09

• Nice American migration graphics.

• Don’t keep calm and carry on.

.....

Wednesday 18 March ’09

• The Times on Tel Aviv’s 100th and no nastiness in sight.

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Sunday 15 March ’09

• Jeremy Clarkson: The Range Rover, quite simply, answers every motoring question that’s ever been posed.

• Indulge in the transcript of the 5-day, 9-hours-a-day “Raiders of the Lost Ark” story conference with Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan.

• Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” by Clay Shirky.

• How Twitter will survive the coming torrent of abuse.

.....

Friday 13 March ’09

• ThruYou. Kutiman (Israei) mixes YouTube. Savava.

• Great for Lost fans: a compilation of characters saying “What?” Similarly, Fucking Midnight Run (loved the movie but hadn’t remembered the preponderance of the term). Fuck it, see the original post of video collections at the brilliant Waxy. Also, Fucking Pulp Fiction. With this one you can almost follow the plot of the movie!

.....

Wednesday 11 March ’09

• Nice post at 37signals urging web folks to benefit by utilizing by-products as older industries do. Even though I don’t use their stuff, 37signals really are the bleeding edge.

.....

Tuesday 10 March ’09

• Stephen Wolfram unstealths Wolfram Alpha. “A new paradigm for using computers and the web. That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!”

• Round-up of Twitter apps including payments and scheduling.

• In defence of eggs. I know this innately and sigh when people say eggs aren’t good for you.

• Bad ethics, bad science, and bad politics. The Weekly Standard on Obama’s restoration of federal funding to embryo-based stem cell research is rather different to how I saw the signing covered by the BBC tonight.

.....

Monday 9 March ’09

• Obama Wikipedia entry whitewashed, WorldNetDaily reports. I feel the creepiness.

.....

Sunday 8 March ’09

• Charlie Rose and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn bond (minute 27:00) over carrying 3 cellphones: iPhone for web, BlackBerry for email, regular for speaking. I say Nokia N95 for all.

• Matt Labash kills Facebook.

• It is the ideology of niceness, the destruction of the punishment/reward balance, that is ravaging the Anglosphere today. To hell with niceness.

• Germaine Greer explores why or whether men are funnier than women.

• It is impossible to begin to imagine the shape of an Internet deprived of the material produced by the newspapers and wire services, writes James V. DeLong.

• Check out the global intifadah: close footage of bad Arab vandalizing Swedish police vans outside the tennis stadium where an Israeli player was competing.

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Saturday 7 March ’09

• Genius blog. Daily Routines — How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.

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Friday 6 March ’09

• Obamanomics. Seems pretty grim to me.

• A modest proposal: Twitter @taxishare.

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Thursday 5 March ’09

• Michael Arrington: It’s Time To Start Thinking of Twitter as a Search Engine.

• Jason Hunter’s mad convoluted theory of the mad convoluted events of Lost.

• Wow, terrific, excellent. How many times at The Jerusalem Post and The Weekly Standard have I fiddled about going to their Print page version because their web pages are so badly designed, the print too small and lacking serifs. Well, now there’s the free browser plug-in Readability. Oh, the human ingenuity.

.....

Tuesday 3 March ’09

• Adamkhan.net has a color that changes based upon photos, but wow, Dave Shea has taken it a step further in Mezzoblue, which I haven’t looked at for ages, and creates an entire palette from each photo, and it’s stunning. Compare this, this, this and this. The best. One more (green this time): this.

• Khoi Vinh — not just an impressive designer but an impressive writer. I guess that’s because he’s an impressive thinker, which underlies both. His latest musings on nailing RSS step back from product review to reflection on the state of the internet nation.

.....

Monday 2 March ’09

• This post is on using Twitter at a presentation. Is this going to be an integral part of conferences?

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Saturday 28 February ’09

• Check out the Grimace Project — combined animated facial expressions.

.....

Friday 27 February ’09

• Free 10-minute international calls at poketalk.com. Works, I tried it.

.....

Thursday 26 February ’09

• Earth’s sexiest television?

• Bloomberg looks at Netanyahu’s likely economic policies.

• Null Eta, Merlin Mann’s visionary strategic business strategy framework strategy.

• Subtly joining the movement, Elliott Abrams on the 3-state solution. “Now, even the mention of Egyptian and Jordanian involvement will evoke loud protests, not least in Amman and Ramallah,” he writes, “and perhaps U.S. policymakers should think but not speak about such an outcome.”

.....

Tuesday 24 February ’09

• Great and juicy. Anyone but Brando. Vanity Fair on the making of The Godfather.

• OMGIF. OH MY GOD ANIMATED GIFS. Pleasing to be human.

• Why they love Twitter: Tim O’Reilly, Brits, various responders to Darren Rowse, celebrities and Scoble.

.....

Monday 23 February ’09

• In Foreign Policy, 13 unexpected consequences of and 20 things that won’t survive the financial crisis.

• Clearleft posts a mockup of the World Wildlife Fund tiger web page. Surely one of the most prestigious web gigs possible.

• Try Wordle. It takes an RSS feed, analyses the word count, and produces a lovely poster text cloud.

• A letter to President Obama imploring him to ask Steve Jobs to lead a combined GM and Chrysler.

.....

Friday 20 February ’09

• Russell Beattie notes the severe drop over time in how much people use their iPhone apps. I’m not as bullish as everyone else seems to be about mobile for one simple reason: it’s just not a comfortable platform for sustained use.

• Ebert on Siskel, 10 years after his death.

• 37signals introduces Sprockets to preprocess and concatenate JavaScript source files.

.....

Wednesday 18 February ’09

• Watch Michael Dolan, a David Allen Company coach, begin a $3,000 day of helping Robert Scoble get things done.

• Only minor adjustments await Americans over the next generation, Spengler argues, compared with the great changes affecting its prospective competitors.

• ifixit.com on disassembling the MacBook Pro 17-inch and my own machine, the fabulous MacBook Pro 15-inch.

• How long before people get much more angry over Obama’s oblique non-committal please-everyone legalese than they were of Bush’s straight-talking?

.....

Tuesday 17 February ’09

• Giora Eiland outlines his land-swap blueprint for improving the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

.....

Monday 16 February ’09

• I find your lack of pants disturbing.

• What an asshat job posting — see the title and first paragraph.

.....

Thursday 12 February ’09

• For economic stimulus, a much more profound healing than massive government spending would be for the USA to once again get back to basics and allow massive immigration. Count me in, please!

• In the last 50 years, the roles of food and sex have reversed. Cute topic but I don’t like her tone; such bland writing does not justify such supercilious attitude.

• This article in The New Scientist, Born believers: How your brain creates God, reads like a parody — taking a topic that philosophers have written on so keenly and producing it in typical newspaper style, rife with quotations by anthropologist X of the University of Y. Makes me feel I’m an idiot for wasting time reading articles on the internet rather than proper books.

• Edward R. Tufte’s Presentation Tips.

.....

Tuesday 10 February ’09

• Now, streaming ’70s and ’80s telly from CBS (US only, but override that with the invaluable and free Hotspot Shield):

  • Beauty and the Beast
  • Beverly Hills 90210
  • Dynasty
  • Family Ties
  • Have Gun – Will Travel
  • Hawaii Five-0
  • The Love Boat
  • MacGyver
  • Melrose Place
  • Perry Mason
  • Star Trek: The Original Series
  • The Twilight Zone
  • Twin Peaks

• Top UK athletes are doing Bikram, the BBC reports. With quotes from little-sister-of-childhood-friend Olga Allon. [via DJS]

• Camera on a Tokyo sushi conveyor belt.

.....

Friday 6 February ’09

• Looks like the so-called stimulus bill is Obama’s gays-in-the-military on steroids. Krauthammer says it best.

• Buffett’s metric says it’s time to buy stocks now that the total market value equals 70% to 80% of GNP again.

.....

Thursday 5 February ’09

• Dear Spengler: letters from Baffled in Beijing, Worried in Washington and Jittery in Jerusalem.

• It’s a fine line between R-E-S-P-E-C-T and S-U-B-M-I-S-S-I-O-N.

• I LEGO NY. Coolness.

.....

Tuesday 3 February ’09

• David Brooks in high Patio Man form discussing the new masters of the universe, the residents of Washington DC’s Ward Three.

• Caroline Glick now endorses the 3-state solution, though writes, interestingly enough, as if she opposes it.

• Peter Berkowitz in The Wall Street Journal:
  Bush hatred and Obama euphoria.
  “Those who, by virtue of their education and professional training,
  would have once been the first to grasp Hamilton’s lesson of moderation
  are today the leading fomenters of immoderation.”

.....

Sunday 1 February ’09

• Will Iraqis help stabilize Afghanistan? This is the dream come satisfyingly true.

• Excellent summary of the Gaza war by Max Boot. “Once again Hamas will reap a public-relations windfall while Israel will be castigated as a human-rights abuser. The Israeli public seems to have accepted such slander as the price of battling those who would destroy it.”

• On becoming a New Yorker.

• Steve Jobs interview with Rolling Stone from December 2003. The intervening 5 years testify to the clarity and prescience of his answers.

• Russell Beattie: “Even though I love putting my thoughts out there, in the back of my mind it’s almost embarrassing to add to the cacophony of opinions that now flow daily from every orifice of the Internet from people who just haven’t gotten the message that it’s just not cool any more.”

• Terry Teachout wrestles with Israel’s informal ban on Wagner.

.....

Thursday 29 January ’09

• Tom Friedman gets aboard the 3-state solution (though he calls it 5-state). My only complaint is his notion that Israel withdraw from all settlements in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem. Why should these areas be Judenrein? This issue, reciprocal minority rights, to me is the real inflection point, not Palestinian right of return.

.....

Wednesday 28 January ’09

• Israel expels Venezuelan diplomats
  and Chavez’s foreign minister tells Al-Jazeera that “it’s an honor”.

.....

Tuesday 27 January ’09

• “Islamic supremacists”: first time I’ve seen the term used in the wild after its recent suggestion (I forget by whom). Caroline Glick uses it to discuss Geert Wilders speaking in Jerusalem.

• It’s been a while, but Thomas Friedman writes a piece that can safely be called stupid.

• David Brooks applies the maxim, “Invert, always invert.”

• “If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation.”

• White House photographers discuss their photos of George W. Bush with Errol Morris, director of the McNamara film Fog of War.

.....

Saturday 24 January ’09

• Krauthammer offers up the only interesting thing I’ve read about Obama’s inauguration speech, noting that he reached back not to King, not to Lincoln but to the slave-tainted time of Washington.

.....

Friday 23 January ’09

• “It’s all total criminality.” The increasingly nutty Noam Chomsky on Israel.

• Stamp of AdamKhan.net approval for John Gruber’s software setup since it’s so similar to my own.

• For idiots like me: the A380 In-Flight Kitchen diner in central Taipei.

.....

Thursday 22 January ’09

• “Hollow man” — Spengler on Obama.

• Here’s Dick Morris with a concise and articulate downer on the Obama presidency. [via Drudge]

• Mark Leibovich profiles Robert Gibbs, the new White House Press Secretary.

.....

Wednesday 21 January ’09

• Back in October, in case you missed it, and even if you didn’t: Charlie Rose discusses the economic crisis with Warren Buffett. How magnificent is an age in which the richest man is also revered as a sage.

• Two more seasons of Mad Men. Who can I pay in gratitude for the fabulosity of this television series? [via Kottke]

• Music from the World of Goo. I bought the game. You should too. [via Kottke]

.....

Tuesday 20 January ’09

• Well-meaning Israel supporters such as Krauthammer, pushing for a maximalist Gaza assault that takes out Hamas, forget that Israel may benefit from every day that the Palestinian national movement is bifurcated into two feuding regimes.

• Interesting new logo for the New York Philharmonic.

• Quintessential Mark Steyn: outrage via humor.

.....

Sunday 18 January ’09

• Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Leon Wieseltier and Ed Zwick talk Defiance with Charlie Rose. A much better movie discussion than he usually has; having Wieseltier around helps. Strange that the Americans are so smooth and articulate and the Englishman so tongue-tied.

.....

Saturday 17 January ’09

• Richard Perle seems transparently disingenuous in claiming that the Iraq invasion was due purely to risk analysis and not also the centerpiece of a larger policy of draining the swamps of Jihad by injecting democracy into Araby.

• Detailed helpful view of Gaza by Haaretz’s Amos Harel.

.....

Friday 16 January ’09

• Spengler. This time on Obama. Always a worthwhile and disturbing read.

.....

Wednesday 14 January ’09

• Jiminy, scary. Anti-Israel demonstrators on Kensington High Street roughed up the local Starbucks.

• Britain’s top 10 fish and chip shops.

.....

Tuesday 13 January ’09

• Winners of the International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest 2008. Lovely to see an underwater Japanese garden.

• On Israel’s situation, Spengler argues that Hamas needs to be killed very dead.

.....

Monday 12 January ’09

• Bush’s final press conference wherein he first warms up when asked about Israel. Fred Barnes lauds his record as “defiantly doing the right thing.” Mark Steyn’s take.

• He’s driving/flying his parawinged buggy from London to Timbuktu, then putting it into production.

.....

Sunday 11 January ’09

• The most detailed report I’ve read yet of the streetfighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

• Bush refused Israel use of Iraqi airspace, claiming its covert sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities was a better way than an aerial bombardment. David Sanger tells Charlie Rose the tale.

.....

Saturday 10 January ’09

• Discover Magazine’s top 100 stories of 2008.

.....

Friday 9 January ’09

• New! The Manualist plays “Come On Eileen”!

• Sunnis vs and not-so-vs Shiites, Reuel Marc Gerecht breaks it down.

.....

Thursday 8 January ’09

• It’s a bit of a fadicha but Israelis watch the fighting in Gaza with binoculars and lawn chairs.

• Israel to journalists: “Ask Egypt to let you into the Gaza Strip”.

• Spengler enters the fray of the demography bores.

.....

Wednesday 7 January ’09

• Den of Geek’s Top 50 movie special effects shots.

• The 6 Most Narcissistic Celebrity Dads.

.....

Tuesday 6 January ’09

• Airbag is right: Watch the battery video.

• Meet the MacBook Wheel, as reported by The Onion.

.....

Monday 5 January ’09

• “I’m Merlin [Mann] and I’m making a video every day this week whether you like it or not.”

• Tony “socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist” Greenstein has images of child victims of the Gaza bombings that should be viewed.

• Israel’s diplomatic situation is fine, Barry Rubin observes.

.....

Sunday 4 January ’09

• Michael Lewis tells the tale of the financial crisis while Christopher Caldwell explains the paradoxical way central banks can help. [Via David Brooks]

• Get a 20% discount at my Dad’s online shop Collectorsworld.net by mentioning adamkhan.net.

.....

Saturday 3 January ’09

• David Horowitz, editor of The Jerusalem Post, provides the best article so far on the Gaza assault, reading like a history.

.....

Wednesday 31 December ’08

• It arrived just fine, the hardback I bought a few weeks ago for £0.43 plus £2.75 postage via an Amazon reseller. Crazily cheap books are becoming increasingly common.

• Religious people have more self-control because they’ve given their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

• Benny Morris, dean of Zionist history, explicates Israel’s current unease.

.....

Tuesday 30 December ’08

• Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first, Spengler argues. Iran. Pakistan.

• On the Gaza attacks, Bret Stephens points out that “no ingenious conceit can disguise the fact that war offers no outcome other than victory or defeat.”

• New Israel Defence Forces YouTube channel.

• Krauthammer pleads at length for a gas tax.

.....

Monday 29 December ’08

• The patents that produced the golden age of electronic games, 1969-1989.

• Michael “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” Pollan for US Secretary of Agriculture.

.....

Wednesday 24 December ’08

• Josh Silver, physicist at Oxford, aims to get $1 adjustable eyeglasses to everyone in the world who needs them by the year 2020. Isn’t that wonderful?

.....

Tuesday 23 December ’08

• Are we all out of innovation?

.....

Saturday 20 December ’08

• Some unusual Bibles.

.....

Wednesday 17 December ’08

• ‘Switch to another browser,’ says The Guardian. ‘Preferably Firefox. This is by far the best option.’

.....

Saturday 13 December ’08

• Ecofont saves 20% of your printer ink [via Gizmodo].

• Connect, empower, entertain with Blackbird, the web browser for Black people! How daft.

.....

Tuesday 9 December ’08

• Spengler: ‘“China’s commitment to classical music”:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JL02Ad01.html will have effects that are at once too subtle and too powerful to categorize easily.’

.....

Saturday 6 December ’08

• Noonan: ‘Homeland is a Nazi-ish word, not an American concept at all.’

• “I like Xenophon,” Theodore Dalrymple quotes a WWI officer. “He is the perfect example of a British gentleman.”

.....

Friday 28 November ’08

• Star Trek vs Star Wars: The Final Battle!

.....

Thursday 27 November ’08

• P. J. O’Rourke is funny again: print journalists need a swift infusion of federal aid.

.....

Wednesday 26 November ’08

• Jeff Bridges’ photos on Making Iron Man on his very cool site.

• On NPR, Brian Eno extolls the benefits of singing.

.....

Monday 24 November ’08

• How To Be Happy Part 1: Get A Dog.

.....

Saturday 8 November ’08

• Obama’s first press conference. I found the stills from the hotel room election night rather more inspiring.

.....

Tuesday 4 November ’08

• “The pseudo-proletariat rhetoric that I think is now so poisonous in Republican ranks, the sean-hannityization of conservatism…” I so love dear David Brooks, here on Charlie Rose!

• Review of the Nokia N96.

.....

Sunday 2 November ’08

• The lure of the diner in the WSJ.

• Impassioned pleas from Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson to not vote Obama.

.....

Saturday 1 November ’08

• According to Spengler, the low level of violence in Iraq during the past several months is due mainly to a tacit agreement between Iran and the Bush administration. Is this true?!? Is the surge a sham?

.....

Thursday 30 October ’08

• Obama as a Nasser-type figure.

.....

Friday 24 October ’08

• Oh, oh, Scirocco.

.....

Wednesday 22 October ’08

• Cuddly OS X pillows.

• 37Signals warns us nicely of future creep.

.....

Monday 20 October ’08

• Hitch jumps ship.

.....

Friday 17 October ’08

• Melvynn Bragg lauds James Bond, and isn’t it fascinating how weak a writer this public semi-intellectual is compared with modern bloggers.

.....

Thursday 16 October ’08

• You must read ‘Farmer in Chief’ by the invaluable Michael Pollan of “East food. Not too much. Mostly plants” fame.

• Download iReadFast (Mac only), set it to fullscreen, crank up the speed to the maximum, 950 words/minute, and paste in your latest op-ed fix. Fun way to read?

.....

Wednesday 15 October ’08

• Betrayed by Dershowitz — Chaim in comment #14 demolishes the great man’s convoluted argument for supporting Obama.

• Tech tips for the basic computer user, like alt-tab and whatnot.

• Talcum powder is now linked to ovarian cancer.

.....

Monday 13 October ’08

• Scrutinizing the 1960s-era props is part of the fun of watching Mad Men.

.....

Saturday 11 October ’08

• On his 50-state trip around America, dual-citizen Jewish English gay showbiz “born to play Oscar Wilde” Stephen Fry acknowledges: ‘Yes they have no idea what cheese or bread can be’.

• William Kristol: ‘Viva McCain’.

• Caroline Glick observes that the US believes that the Lebanese government is a credible ally while Israel on the other hand sees the Hizbullah-dominated government as its enemy.

.....

Friday 10 October ’08

• Why tea, lemon and honey for a cold?

• There’s a new logo for Best Buy, the consumer electronics chain. The old one seemed better as being visible from the highway, whereas the new one seems more inviting if you’re already cruising within a shopping mall.

• Having just had Aaron over for a weekend, this Telegraph piece on the Brits’ tendency to drink too much, as encouraged by the Queen Mother, read especially relevant/poignant/pertinent/[hic].

.....

Thursday 9 October ’08

• Obama’s plane stinks and the campaign in general mistreats journalists.

.....

Tuesday 7 October ’08

• The Veep debate, distilled by SNL... and the presidential debate as well.

.....

Saturday 4 October ’08

• On the set of David Zucker’s new movie An American Carol.

• OJ convicted — how prescient, the saying that in history tragedy comes around again as farce.

.....

Friday 3 October ’08

• Brooks of the Times then Krauthammer of the Post on the Biden/Palin debate.

.....

Thursday 2 October ’08

• Slow-mo hi-def video of people getting punched in the face — is this really how our faces deal with the blow? [Via literaryhack.com]

.....

Sunday 28 September ’08

• Sasha Baron-Cohen crashes the Milan Fashion Festival as Bruno. Video (scroll to end) complete with commentary by the chick filming it. She tells her audience she loves him and tries to explain to the police that he’s legit, a journalist. So easy to forget the Italian things, like how “journalist” is hallowed.

.....

Saturday 27 September ’08

• Lamenting a bailout.

.....

Thursday 25 September ’08

• Motley Fool: Buffett swarms in.

.....

Wednesday 24 September ’08

• IBM on jQuery.

.....

Tuesday 23 September ’08

• The upcoming Google phone, G1, as reviewed by Walt Mossberg, has both a keyboard and a touchscreen — score! — but is it really a smartphone?

• Palin’s would-be speech on Ahmedinejad.

.....

Monday 22 September ’08

• Why Constellation preferred Warren Buffett to $35 a share.

• Profile of Stuff White People Like guy.

• Gruber gets it just right on the recent Windows ads.

• John F. Burns, doyen of American journalists in Iraq and now stationed in London, sums up the state of play regarding the prime minister’s political struggle.

• Replacing Heathrow with a 24-hour artificial island-based airport in the Thames Estuary.

• Limit your kids’ cellphone use.

.....

Sunday 21 September ’08

• ‘Hi, I’m Ruby on Rails.’ ‘And I’m Dot Net.’

• McCartney on Yesterday: I woke up one morning and I had this tune in my head and I spent the next week asking people what it was and nobody could define what it was.

.....

Monday 15 September ’08

• Orange Pekoe is the perfect complement to a British fry-up breakfast. The writer wins me over with his disdain for the teabag and the sports section.

.....

Saturday 13 September ’08

• jQuery UI demos.

• The Alaska state budget.

• If I were in New York I’d definitely go to Sushi Azabu.

.....

Friday 12 September ’08

• How Digg Works.

• Those frothing against Palin fail to distinguish between “common” and “the common touch.”

.....

Thursday 11 September ’08

• In a funk, is Biden next under the bus?

• Does Palin believe in dinosaurs? Matt Damon really wants to know.

• The touch-screen quandary is solved — for people like us who love QWERTY at any rate. By the genius behind T9.

• Alex Payne’s rules for computing happiness though #4 is wacky.

.....

Wednesday 10 September ’08

• Delicious rant against the Palin pick by Leon Wieseltier, author of Kaddish.

.....

Monday 8 September ’08

• Spengler mercilessly skewers Obama on the Biden choice.

• NiiMe: use the accelerometer in your phone to control things on your computer (Windows only).

.....

Saturday 6 September ’08

• Zeldman walks to work.

• First impressions of the Nokia N96.

• For everything you needed to know about the Republican National Convention, here’s David Brooks, totally sharp, and Charles Krauthammer, dependably wise.

.....

Friday 5 September ’08

• Despite being a supporter I agree with this scathing review of McCain’s acceptance speech.

.....

Thursday 4 September ’08

• A letter from someone who has known Sarah Palin since 1992 and is about 70% anti (again via DJ Sanders). My opinion of Palin: a seductive rattlesnake who will help get McCain elected and be far less popular than him by the end of his term.

• Lowdown on the Israel-Georgian relationship. Turns out the Georgian defence minister is a former Israeli.

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Wednesday 3 September ’08

• This needs to be on the cover of Time Magazine (via DJ Sanders).

• The website is down — the best short film (10 mins) I’ve seen on the internet.

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Monday 1 September ’08

• Yves Rossy, rocket man.

• Fourth of four posts on how Symbian S60 and Apple’s OS X play together.

• Upload data to many-eyes.com and display it in various ways.

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Sunday 31 August ’08

• Amotz Asa-El annoints Israel’s next leader, Avishay Braverman.

• Barry Rubin gropes towards an overarching Middle Easy strategy.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers

• Bill Ayers, the next Rev Wrightgate.

• Glick on Biden on Iran.

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Saturday 30 August ’08

• Who is the Chancellor of the Exchequor?

• A first look at the Nokia n85.

• Fred Barnes on Sarah Palin.

• Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol then Karl Rove on Obama’s acceptance speech.

• National Review likes the Palin pick and so does the Weekly Standard.

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Friday 29 August ’08

• David Brooks gives Obama’s nomination speech.

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Thursday 28 August ’08

• From Iran, a conversation with the President of Iran.

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Wednesday 27 August ’08

• More Spengler on Russia: Invading Georgia was a demography-driven necessity.

• Peace was the word, and the Voice of Peace was the station, 24 hours a day. Abie Nathan, 81.

• A return to Symbian from iPhone.

• Armed forces of the world, ranked. Incredibly, Israel is 4th after the USA, China and India!

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Tuesday 26 August ’08

• For Russia, to dominate is to be.

• The American dream of happiness might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins.

• Is it every David Brooks column I link to? Advice to Obama at the Convention.

• Nice, high-falutin’ piece on the web site profession at ALA.

• Another Anglo miracle: solar-powered aircraft flies indefinitely.

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Sunday 24 August ’08

• Zadie Smith, whom I admire but don’t much like, on E. M. Forster, whose Passage to India just gets increasingly spectacular.

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Saturday 23 August ’08

• Returning Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan is the only feasible peacable outcome of the Israel-Palestinian conflict; is there a Saudi plan on the table?

• Some best buys.

• David Brooks tells us who Joe Biden is.

• Krauthammer: The fate of far more than Georgia is at stake.

• The WSJ likes Coogan’s new Hamlet 2 but judging by the videoclip on the page, his phony American accent grates even more than it’s designed to.

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Friday 22 August ’08

• Photo album by an AP reporter of Bush at the Olympics.

• A case for AAPL.

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Thursday 21 August ’08

• Op-ed by the author of The Case Against Barak Obama, who I believe lost the election when Russia invaded Georgia, and this book’s the icing.

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Tuesday 19 August ’08

• We must reject the Russian fairy tale that aid to Russia’s neighbors is a threat to Russia.

• British children suffer from a system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism.

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Monday 18 August ’08

• Victory jig (via DJ Sanders).

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Sunday 17 August ’08

• None of this would have happened if he had been medicated.

• Both McCain and Obama do well answering questions from a pastor. Update: Now that I’ve heard some of the audio, sounds like McCain trounced Obama.

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Saturday 16 August ’08

• Dennis Miller presents Shofar accompaniments.

• Spengler says Georgia never should have been an ally in the first place.

• The most important foodstuff to buy organic is butter; next priority would be meats.

• It’s a long but heartfelt rumination on being an unhappy youth at Rome.

• The lesson of Georgia.

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Thursday 14 August ’08

• The US is already running circles around Russia Russia in the wake of Georgia.

• Bush saved us, now on to the next boom.

• Face is the place.

• The future is here as Boeing introduces its air-to-surface laser (via Instapundit).

• After cancelling elections, Gordon Brown’s second fatal own goal was abandoning Basra.

• Latte art.

• My new guru Tim Ferriss finally learns to swim.

• Charles Murray undermines the BA.

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Wednesday 13 August ’08

• Let’s do the Time Warp again, again!

• The pill messes up women’s sense of smell in men.

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Tuesday 12 August ’08

• America is slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

• Design is born of constraints.

• Tufte presents iPhone: For clarity, do detail.

• Once again, George W. Bush is a great president on things both big and small.

• David Brooks interprets the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

• Is Turkey a liability?

• Groups of rollerbladers through Tel Aviv: I was as usual ahead of my time.

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Monday 11 August ’08

• Georgia, the geographic and historical crucible where Russia meets the Turkic and Persian Near East.

• It’s 1982. You need no longer stop at the end of the line for a carriage return.

• The tyranny of clocks, Socrates’ distrust of writing, yada yada: The Atlantic worries about the web.

• Denmark is a model nation —that’s energy independence not Lego.

• Israel has two dogs in the Russian-Georgian conflict.

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Saturday 9 August ’08

• As a proud owner of “wireless headphones from Finland”, I’m among the skewered by David Brooks.

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Friday 8 August ’08

• The Starbucks effect comes to smartphones as Apple yanks iPhone wireless modem app — Nokia should rally around this.

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Thursday 7 August ’08

• Israel threatens Russia that its S-300 anti-missile system will be neutralized if sold to Iran.

• Aircraft carriers are heading towards Iran. Is this it?

• A strong show at the Republican convention next month is McCain’s biggest chance, says Karl Rove.

• More good news from Iraq: Moqtada al-Sadr has laid down his weapons.

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Wednesday 6 August ’08

• ““I’m Paris Hilton and I approve this message”:http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/64ad536a6d because I think it’s totally hot.” Via Drudge.

• See Lileks back skillfully into his Solzhenitsyn eulogy then relate his daughter’s birthday outing, both in the same piece.

• The first step in a campaign calling for a mandatory death penalty for terrorist murderers would be to conduct a poll.

• Bolton notes Iran’s progress in both its nuke program and its deterrence against attacking that program.

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Tuesday 5 August ’08

• At 46, Douglas “Gen X” Coupland ponders aging.

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Monday 4 August ’08

• Our concept of the state begins with our understanding of God.

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Saturday 2 August ’08

• Deep inside 7/7.

• To overcome globosclerosis David Brooks supports McCain’s League of Democracies.

• Is Iran training for an EMP attack on America?

• How to address copy-editors over a wrongly omitted “a”.

• The Tale of Gore-Al.

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Friday 1 August ’08

• David’s Horowitz’s sentences are gaining stature.

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Thursday 31 July ’08

• “A myth to Himself. Has to be,” Sun Ra says of God.

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Tuesday 29 July ’08

• “A very peculiar restless thing of the British, isn’t it," relates travel writer Eric Newby’s widow.

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Monday 28 July ’08

• Today’s top absurdity.

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Wednesday 23 July ’08

• The BatSignal as W in the sky.

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Monday 21 July ’08

• A New York Timesman walks Tel Aviv from the Hilton beach down to Jaffa.

• It was indeed unnerving that the Istanbul Hilton had an airport-style metal detector at the entrance to the lobby; Turkey could fall, Spengler laments.

• The US military will be an agent both for destruction and creation, Lt. General William Caldwell tells Charlie Rose.

• “My father was a Minister of the Church who learned Hebrew and had a deep and life long affection for Israel," Gordon Brown tells the Knesset as PM.

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Sunday 20 July ’08

• Kimberly Kagan reports on progress in Iraq though admittedly she’s one of the Surge’s architects.

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Saturday 23 January ’99

• Let’s go to Test Take Control

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Sources

• David Brooks
• Caroline Glick
• The Jerusalem Post
• The Atlantic
• Spengler
• James Lileks
• The Wall Street Journal