Frank Rich: Who Wants to Kick A Millionaire?
Congress can’t get the answers either. Its oversight panel declared in a first report this month that the Treasury is doling out billions “without seeking to monitor the use of funds provided to specific financial institutions.” The Treasury prefers instead to look at “general metrics” indicating the program’s overall effect on the economy. Well, we know what the “general metrics” tell us already: the effect so far is nil. Perhaps if we were let in on the specifics, we’d start to understand why.
Between Obama and the Press
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I met Gibbs for lunch at a cafe near his home in Alexandria. He is 37 but has an ageless face — at once boyish and well worn — that could put him anywhere from 25 to 50. Gibbs gained considerable weight during the campaign that he is trying to shed, and he has a habit — maybe unconscious — of running his hands up and down his paunch while he speaks. (“The chronicle of his weight is a story unto itself,” Obama told me.)
Gibbs scrolled back a few days on his BlackBerry to show me a helpful reminder that the current White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, sent him. “Remember to unlist your phone number,” it said. “Your wife will thank you.” (His wife, Mary Catherine, had already thought of that.)
Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.
The Buzzwords of 2008
Largely used online, this is a verb turned into a mass noun, as in “A bucket of fail.” Common forms include epic fail, meaning a huge overall tendency toward failure or a great example of failure, and FAIL! as an interjection or derogation. Often an antonym of win, seen online in forms like “Full of win!” which means, “It’s good!”
You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network
When you ask someone for help, request specific advice or information rather than leads for jobs, and both of you will feel more comfortable. It is risky for people to give someone they’ve just met a job lead or an introduction because it can put their reputations on the line, Ms. Baber said.
Particle Man
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.
Rabbi David Lieber, Scholar and University President, Dies at 83
A renowned biblical scholar, Rabbi Lieber had for more than 20 years contemplated the compilation of a volume of commentary on the Torah that would provide a modern interpretation for Conservative Jews. Finally, in 2002, with essays by 41 prominent rabbis and scholars, “Etz Hayim” (Hebrew for “Tree of Life”) was issued by the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million members of the movement in North America.
Until the 1,560-page “Etz Hayim” was introduced, the commentary of Joseph Hertz, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth in the 1930s, was the basis for Conservative Torah interpretation. Rabbi Hertz’s work countenanced no doubt that the Torah was the literal word of God. And that is the immutable view of Orthodox Jews, many of whom raised objections to “Etz Hayim.”
There was even discomfort among Conservative Jews, including Rabbi Susan Grossman, an “Etz Hayim” co-editor. After the book was released, Rabbi Grossman told The New York Times that the “basic historicity” of the Torah “is valid and verifiable.”
You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book
Sometimes things get lost in books. The novelist Diana Abu-Jaber recalled putting a favorite photograph of a friend’s greyhound inside her copy of M. F. K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf” — and then promptly leaving the book on a plane. (“I hope it comforts someone who’s afraid of flying,” she wrote in an e-mail message.) Similarly, the musician Dan Zanes once used a book to store a prized possession given him by his mother — a rare photograph of J. D. Salinger, taken by Mrs. Zanes’s mentor, the German photographer Lotte Jacobi. “I’m sure it’s safe, but I have no idea where it’s safe,” Zanes said. “Not in any book that I currently own, that’s for sure.”
Need a Ride? Check Your iPhone
“You put the iPhone on the dashboard, and it records the entire trip and sends the route to our network,” he said. The system stores the route, adding it to its menu of paths and pick-up points and offering them automatically to interested riders.
A Generation With More Than Hand-Eye Coordination
“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” he writes. “They care strongly about justice and the problems faced by their society and are typically engaged in some kind of civic activity at school, at work or in their communities.”
. Observe: 
. Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses. This was her "crowd"
: Alternatives exclude.
s
