Editor's Letter
Editor's Letter
Michelle Obama is one accomplished woman. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, she’s worked for a top-notch law firm and for the city of Chicago. Now she’s a high-powered hospital executive, a firebrand on the stump, and a fixture of various magazines’ “Most Influential” lists—in short, she’s someone to be reckoned with. Why, then, does she need special protection from her critics? Ever since Michelle declared . . .
Editor's Letter
I work in a big city, where the screams of a passing siren barely dent one’s consciousness and only the most sensational crimes make the local papers. Then there is The Gazette, the weekly newspaper that covers the small community in which I live. The village is only 30 miles north of Manhattan, but viewed through the prism of The Gazette, it might as well be on another planet . . .
Editor's Letter
When I heard that Charlton Heston had died, I called my younger brother. We talked for several animated minutes about the brawny action star with whom we’d grown up—the jut-jawed monolith who survived an earthquake, single-handedly stood down a planet of apes, and slaughtered mutants by the bushel in The Omega Man. By the time I hung up, we were both bellowing, “Soylent Green is people!” What we didn’t talk about, though, was Heston’s real-life role as a conservative cultural warrior, his presidency of the NRA, or anything remotely having to do with his politics. Did we do ol’ Chuck a disservice? Or did we . . .
Editor's Letter
The world is coming to an end. Chicken Little was correct about this, if a bit premature; the only relevant questions are how, and when. The current conventional wisdom is that Doomsday will occur no later than 2 billion years hence, when the sun expands, boils off the oceans, and turns our green planet into a charcoal briquette. But if we’re far less lucky, the End may come as soon as May, when a black hole created by scientists in Geneva, Switzerland, swallows you, me, and all 6.6 billion souls on the Earth in one big gulp. A scientific gadfly from Hawaii named Walter F. Wagner contends . . .
Editor's Letter
Think about the upcoming Olympic Games in China, and you’re bound to think of Tibet. Pro-Tibetan activists have succeeded in making the Buddhist region, occupied by China since 1950, part of any conversation about the Beijing Olympics. Some of this global attention is the result of boycott calls, such as that by the actor Richard Gere, a prominent Buddhist activist. But most of it is the logical result of China’s heavy-handed response to the recent riots in Tibet. News that security services left monks lying dead in the streets simply makes bad publicity. World sympathy is on the side of the Tibetans. Far less attention is paid to the oppressed people who live . . .
Editor's Letter
It’s harder than ever to find a spot on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a marketing opportunity. Everything from park benches to high school gymnasiums now comes with commercial sponsors, and ads have been popping up in restaurant bathrooms and even at the end of personal e-mails. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that advertising is now claiming the final frontier. A science consortium called the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association runs a space center on an Arctic Ocean archipelago that transmits signals into outer space, on the outside chance there are species out there who might be listening. For the first time, the scientists have teamed up with a sponsor, Doritos maker Frito-Lay, which has invited the British public to submit 30-second commercials about life on this Doritos-munching planet of ours. The winning entry will be transmitted via . . .
Editor's Letter
My wife and I were surprised some years ago when my younger daughter, Jessica, was born with blue eyes. We both have brown. I remembered enough from high school biology to deduce that both of us had inherited a recessive blue-eye gene from our parents; in my case, it was my Dad’s. He adored both my daughters, but took special pride in Jessie’s blue eyes; I could see, when he studied her sweet features, that he found there a very tangible form of immortality. “Where did you get those blue eyes?” he’d say. “Pop-pop,” Jessie always replied. They went through this routine dozens of times over the years, but every time he heard her answer, he’d beam as if he’d won the Lottery. One day last week, Jessie, now 12, sat at the breakfast table, all lit up by the morning sun, while I told her that her Pop-pop was dying . . .
Editor's Letter
Want proof that the TV writers’ strike is really over? Saturday Night Live is back in the controversy business. In its first new show of the year, SNL chose non-black cast member Fred Armisen to portray Barack Obama in a presidential debate skit. It wasn’t exactly Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope. Still, some bloggers and other critics thought that making up Armisen—whose background is German, Venezuelan, and Japanese—as a black man was offensive. “They couldn’t find an African-American performer who was funny enough?” . . .
Editor's Letter
Hillary Clinton has accused Barack Obama of “plagiarism” for lifting several lines of a speech from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Obama’s defense is that Patrick is a friend who himself had urged Obama to use the passage—which, ironically enough, quoted some classic American speeches to show that inspiring oratory cannot be dismissed as “just words.” But Obama could have mounted a different defense: that in appropriating another’s words, he was following a time-honored political tradition. Because some of the greatest oratorical flourishes in American history—including an FDR quote cited by Obama/Patrick—did not . . .
Editor's Letter
Another week, another massacre. Last week, a mentally ill young man armed with three handguns and a pump-action shotgun began firing inside a crowded auditorium at Northern Illinois University, but he managed to kill “only” five people and wound 16 before he turned a gun on himself. So the story disappeared off most newspapers’ Page One in a day. Over the past year, nuts with guns have produced bloodbaths in colleges and high schools, in shopping malls and stores and city council meetings, and even in the pews of a mega-church. These acts of homegrown terrorism have become . . .
Editor's Letter
The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed are causing trouble again. First published by a Danish newspaper in 2005, the 12 satirical editorial cartoons were intended as a challenge to Islamic extremists: Don’t tell us what we can and can’t print. Some of the images were fairly innocuous—one showed Mohammed as a shepherd, another had him wearing a Viking helmet—although they could still be considered . . .
Editor's Letter
This election season has produced a strange disconnect. On the one hand, we’ve had the media narrative, propelled by breathless talk of “momentum” and “inevitability” and “collapses.” Then there are the voters. Remember last spring, when we were told that Hillary Clinton and John McCain were virtually unstoppable, and that because of the compressed primary schedule . . .
Editor's Letter
My good friends, I’m running for president. Let me enumerate just a few of the many reasons why I deserve your vote. I am, above all, the candidate of change, much more so than my opponents; indeed, if elected, I will change everything that you, the American people, want changed, including any of my positions that I have already changed. Due to my wealth of experience, which is both unique and yet somehow universal, I will be ready to serve on Day One, and to protect the nation from . . .
Editor's Letter
In my mind’s eye, he’ll always be the angular, wavy-haired superstar in a bespoke suit that he was in his prime—not the pathetic, stateless, wild-bearded anti-Semite that he devolved into. In remembering Bobby Fischer this way, I know I’m romanticizing him. Even at his best, in Reykjavik, he came across as one of the most self-centered and obsessive people on the planet. He argued endlessly about the dimensions of the chessboard, the . . .
