The Obamas’ Marriage
Another Washington dusk, another motorcade, another intimate evening played out in public view. On Oct. 3, just a day after their failed Olympics bid in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the Web looked glamorous: the president tieless, in a suit; the first lady in a backless sheath.
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Going Along for the Rides
Curtis Sliwa, 55, has spent the last 30 years riding the New York City subways as the founding member of the Guardian Angels crime-patrolling group. He has a second career as a radio talk show host on WABC-AM (770). He spends each Sunday touring the subway system with his 5-year-old son, Anthony, while his long-suffering wife, Mary, also 55, waits at their home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
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Block-a-Thon
On Sunday morning, 40,000 people will run, walk and wheel their way 26.2 miles through New York’s five boroughs in a whirlwind tour of the city at its most festive. My personal marathon, restricted to the long rectangle created by Baltic and Warren Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn, offered something more subtle: a glimpse at a day in the life of my neighborhood.
The idea came to me on my umpteenth walk with Barnaby, a basset hound with a trace of beagle that we adopted from a shelter in June. Somehow, the thought “This is pathetic — I’m walking miles every day without getting anywhere” morphed into “What if we kept walking — without going anywhere? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?”
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Keep Those Eyes on the Skies
Were they asleep? No, just glued to their personal laptops — a violation of airline policy — to figure out together a complicated new pilot scheduling system while their Airbus A-320 flew on autopilot with 144 passengers on board. “The ultimate example of distracted driving,” one Washington lawmaker called it last week.
Air traffic controllers tried to make radio contact for 91 minutes. The military put four fighter jets at the ready, fearing a hijacking. The White House situation room was alerted. A flight attendant finally roused the pilots’ attention by telephoning the locked cockpit to ask why they weren’t descending.
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The Difference a Year Makes
BABY boomers are counted as lucky for having lived through a time of unprecedented prosperity. But Harry MacAvoy, 52, believes that within his generation, there was one year to be born that was luckier than the rest, 1957.
“We completely missed the upheaval of the 60s, the Vietnam protests on campus, the draft,” said Mr. MacAvoy, who is research director for Republican legislators in the New York State Assembly and happens to have been born in, yes, 1957. “But we were old enough to remember the moon landing, the opening of Disney World and we got to college at the height of anything goes.”
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Why Google Doesn’t Like Its Phone Bill
In a company blog post last month, Google said some rural phone companies partner with “sex chat lines and ‘free’ conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic” in what is called “traffic pumping” in the telecom industry.
“People are on the phone for hours — Grandma wouldn’t be on all day,” said Richard Whitt, the Washington telecom and media counsel for Google, in a recent interview.
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Escalations
This problematic legacy explains, in part, why another young Democratic president now finds himself at a crossroads similar to the one Kennedy was preparing to negotiate in 1963. Barack Obama’s dilemma in Afghanistan has its roots in the conundrum that Democrats faced during the last two presidential campaigns: how to oppose the war in Iraq without being fatally caricatured, yet again, as feckless heirs to the McGovernite left. Their solution was to stress their fervor for a different war. Sure, they wanted to withdraw from Iraq, but they wanted to shift more troops and treasure to Afghanistan, where the true aggressors of Sept. 11 were still evading capture. Who could call that weak? It was a sensible policy that also made for irresistible politics.
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Keats Speaks
Lost though I was in admiration of the elfin good looks of Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, and the poise of Abbie Cornish, who plays Brawne, I managed to retain enough presence of mind during this scene to admire their dialogue too, which sounded like authentic Georgian English. This is how they might actually have talked, I thought: playful, delicate, precise. How did Campion, who wrote the deft and artful screenplay herself, come up with it?
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Bookstores and Beyond
EVEN really careful planners, the ones who started saving and budgeting for college before they got to high school, are likely to gnash their teeth each semester when they head to the bookstore to buy their textbooks, only to discover that “Molecular Biology of the Cell” costs $215; “Calculus: Early Transcendental Functions,” $218; and “Business Driven Technology,” $202.
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