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Slate Magazine
Slate--the Internet's informed look at news, politics, and culture. Slate separates the facts from the spin with thought-provoking stories, irreverent humor, and delicious reads.
- Slate V: Florida Pastor Cancels Quran Burning
President Barack Obama sternly admonished Florida pastor Rev. Terry Jones and appealed to him to call off plans to torch the Quran, which Jones did late Thursday afternoon. AP's Mark Smith reports. (Sept. 9) - Why female technology entrepreneurs are so hard to find.
Jessica Mah is co-founder and CEO of InDinero.com, a business software company that launched in March 2009. A year-and-a-half later, 4,000 businesses use the financial-tracking platform to manage a collective $400 million. The startup also boasts $1.5 million in funding from YouTube's Jawed Karim and Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, among others.[more ...] Business - YouTube - Jessica Mah - Jeremy Stoppelman - Jawed Karim - Advertisement:
- Why the judicial vacancy crisis matters.
Maybe it's a failure of language. Perhaps we've been referring to it as the "judicial-vacancy crisis" for so long that nobody believes it's a crisis anymore. Maybe we should upgrade it to a national judicial disaster or the global war on the judiciary. As the Los Angeles Times reported last week, approximately one federal judicial seat in eight is now vacant, and more are opening up. But instead of attempting to fix the problem, both sides argue over who is to blame.[more ...] United States - Los Angeles Times - Judiciary - Law - Supreme Court of the United States - The World Trade Center appeared in my photographs, but in the distance.
The World Trade Center appeared in my photographs, but in the distance.[more ...] World Trade Center - September 11 2001 - Terrorism - Incidents - Warfare and Conflict - NFL 2010: Man, Brett Favre is annoying.
Hell, Josh, I might have made the 32-yarder that Garrett Hartley gacked left in the fourth quarter. And he missed a 46-yarder the same way in the second quarter. (My attempt from that distance, however, would have landed in the end zone, if it cleared the leaping linemen at all.) In any event, after one game, NFL placekickers have made 33.3 percent of their field-goal attempts. The shame! In 2008, I wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated asserting that kickers were so good that it was only a matter of time before the NFL modified its rules to make our craft more challenging. Indeed, that year sidewinders bagged a record 84.5 percent of field-goal attempts and missed just six extra points out of 1,176, which is pretty incredible. (Sadly, when the Saints blocked Vikings kicker Ryan Longwell after Minnesota's lone touchdown, my dream of the first perfect year for PATs died.) Our friends at Football Outsiders point out that field-goal percentages tend to fluctuate; wind, distance, field condition, physical and mental state, and botched assignments all play a role in individual kicks. So last year's NFL-wide 81.3 percent success rate (fourth-best ever) was about right while the 20 missed PATs were an outlier, the worst percentage since 2001 and the most misses since 1993. Hartley, by the way, rushed both kicks; his hips and right leg rotated too quickly, causing him to hook the ball left. I'd imagine Saints fans have it in their hearts to forgive him.[more ...] NFL - Garrett Hartley - Minnesota - Sport - Brett Favre - Michel Houellebecq borrowed from Wikipedia. Is he in trouble?
French writer Michel Houellebecq has always loved to pepper his novels with long encyclopedic descriptions of personalities, locations, and scientific concepts. In his new novel, the excellent La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory), which is the toast of the French literary scene, Houellebecq launches into tedious digressions about topics as varied as the housefly and the city of Beauvais. Some of the passages seemed so much like Wikipedia entries that Slate.fr, Slate's French sister site, decided to check, and?surprise!?discovered that at least three passages from the book are borrowed from the online encyclopedia.[more ...] Michel Houellebecq - Wikipedia - Literature - French language - Slate - The Slatest: Afternoon Edition
Arianna Huffington just can't believe the way the media is making a big deal out of an irrelevant story; Iraq has to pay Americans for trauma inflicted during the 90s; Prince Charles promotes sustainable dying.[more ...] - Does Obama actually work in the Oval Office?
After the White House released photos of the newly renovated Oval Office late last month, the Explainer noticed something a little bizarre: There was no computer on President Obama's desk, or any paperwork, either. Does Obama actually work in the Oval Office?[more ...] Oval Office - Barack Obama - White House - President of the United States - President - Welcome to the Fashion Apocalypse.
Grab your Goyard totes, girls! Gird up your loins with Gaultier girdles! The style armageddon is upon us! The final runway rapture is looming! Welcome to the Fashion Apocalypse![more ...] Fashion - Design - Arts - Magazines and E-zines - Jean-Paul Gaultier - The Political Gabfest for Sept. 10, 2010.
Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.[more ...] Facebook - Online Communities - Social Networking - Politics - Government - The clarifying chaos of the Quran-burning saga.
So let me get this straight: A Florida minister who has fewer than 50 followers, doesn't answer to any Christian organization, and doesn't even know the other pastors in his town set off panic and violence around the world by holding hostage a few copies of the Quran. He withstood pleas from the National Association of Evangelicals, the World Evangelical Alliance, the U.S. Secretary of State, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Then, in negotiations with an imam from Orlando, he agreed to surrender his hostages in exchange for what he thought was a deal to relocate a Manhattan mosque from its planned site near Ground Zero. But the imam in Manhattan said he had made no such deal and hadn't even talked to the imam from Orlando. So now the minister says he was double-crossed and might burn his hostages after all.[more ...] Florida - Afghanistan - United States - Qur'an - National Association of Evangelicals - Advertisement:
- Corrections from the last week.
In a Sept. 8 "Politics," John Dickerson misidentified Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as majority leader.[more ...] Mitch McConnell - Party leaders of the United States Senate - Government - Politics - Senate - Obama economics adviser Austan Goolsbee's contributions to Slate.
"Michael Moore and the Beige Bomber: He's got the indictment of health care right, but not the fix." Posted July 1, 2007.[more ...] Austan Goolsbee - Barack Obama - Michael Moore - President - United States - From lepers to paranoia: The twisted history of the polka dot.
From lepers to paranoia: The twisted history of the polka dot.[more ...] Arts - Polka - Dance - Performing Arts - Folk - Did federal government policy create the Great Divergence?
Liberal politicians and activists have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by "federal government," they generally mean Republicans, who have controlled the White House for 20 of the past 30 years, after all. A few outliers even argue that for Republicans, creating income inequality was a conscious and deliberate policy goal.Until recently, the consensus among academics?even most liberal ones?was quite different. Economists argued that the Great Divergence was the result not of Washington policymaking but of larger "exogenous" (external) and "secular" (long-term) forces. In June, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that spending by the federal government made up 23 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, after averaging 18.5 percent during the previous four decades. But even with federal spending at this unusually high level (necessitated by a severe recession), Washington's nut remains less than one-quarter the size of the economy. Most of that nut is automatic "entitlement" spending over which Washington policymakers seldom exert much control. Brad DeLong, a liberal economist at Berkeley, expressed the prevailing view in 2006: "[T]he shifts in income inequality seem to me to be too big to be associated with anything the government does or did." My Slate colleague Mickey Kaus took this argument one step further in his 1992 book The End of Equality, positing that income inequality was the inevitable outgrowth of ever-more-ruthlessly efficient markets, and that government attempts to reverse it were certain to fail. "[Y]ou cannot decide to keep all the nice parts of capitalism," he wrote, "and get rid of all the nasty ones." Instead, Kaus urged liberals to combat social inequality by nurturing egalitarian civic institutions (parks, schools, libraries, museums) and by creating some new ones (national health care, national service, a revived WPA) that remove many of life's most important activities from the "money sphere" altogether.[more ...] United States - Congressional Budget Office - White House - Economic inequality - Federal government of the United States - An interactive inquiry about why America hasn't been attacked again.
An interactive inquiry about why America hasn't been attacked again.[more ...] Television - United States - September 11 2001 - Arts - Washington Post - The Marine who found two WTC survivors.
The Marine who found two WTC survivors.[more ...] World Trade Center - Business - WTC - Transportation and Logistics - Construction - Play Lean/Lock and test your skills as a political pundit.
Test your powers of political forecasting.[more ...] Slate - United States - Video Games - Games - Programming - Why 9/11 is no longer a day free of politics.
The liberal panic of the week, now that Saturday's Quran-burning ceremony has been canceled, is the mystery-cloaked rally that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are holding in Anchorage tomorrow evening. "Right Wing Leaders Plan To Use September 11th Anniversary To Make Money," writes Lee Fang at ThinkProgress. "Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck Exploit 9/11 for Profit" reads a headline at FireDogLake.[more ...] Sarah Palin - Glenn Beck - Politics - United States - Parties - Welcome to Slate Labs: Experiments with multimedia journalism.
Experiments with multimedia journalism.[more ...] Journalism - Education - Media - Multimedia - Business - Slate readers try to predict the price of a share GM stock.
Sometime this fall, you will be able to buy stock again in General Motors. Right now you?meaning the American taxpayer?own about three-fifths of GM. When GM returns to the stock exchange, you?meaning a private investor?will be able to purchase shares in GM. And for a few weeks leading up to its initial public offering, we're asking you?meaning Slate readers?to predict how much a share of GM's stock will be worth at the end of its first day back. To help you crunch the numbers, here are several hundred pages from the former Largest Carmaker in the World, explaining its plans.[more ...] GeneralMotors - Initial public offering - Stock - United States - Stock exchange - Why this campaign is likely to turn pretty nasty pretty soon.
Each week until the election, I'm posting some of the questions I'm trying to answer based on news of the week or something that's come up in my reporting. In the following weeks, I'll try to answer some of these questions. Feel free to weigh in with answers?or with more political questions?at slatepolitics@gmail.com or in the comments section below. Here are this week's questions[more ...] Gmail - Politics - United States - Etiquette - Recreation - Naming practices in Nigeria.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan made headlines by replacing the leaders of his security forces on Wednesday. He's not the first Nigerian political leader to have an auspicious name: Lucky Igbinedion was the governor of Edo state. Jonathan's wife is named Patience Jonathan. Are Nigerian names always so loaded?[more ...] Nigeria - Goodluck Jonathan - Lucky Igbinedion - Africa - President of Nigeria