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Monday, Mar 04, 2002

stargazers

"According to a group of scientists for whom the term "wildly optimistic dreamers" is virtually a job description, it will indeed be very difficult to travel to other stars, and nobody in either the public or private sector is about to try it any time soon. But as the researchers see it, the challenge is not insurmountable, it requires no defiance of the laws of physics, so why not have fun and start thinking about it now?"

save ferris

"This website has one simple aim: to save Nightline, one of the last vestiges of quality in America's broadcast news industry, from being removed from its 11:35pm ET time slot."

the infotainer

"In the intervening 45 years the wardrobe and lingo have changed some, and the relative power of various players has shifted. But as a benchmark of modern cultural history, ''Sweet Smell'' is more like the end of a beginning than the beginning of any end. Since the film's release, the infotainment-industrial complex grew exponentially from post-vaudeville germination to the all-subsuming 500-channel efflorescence of global media-movie-music conglomerates; gossip columns and crypto-gossip columns began appearing in more and more magazines and newspapers, including this one; celebrity became both indiscriminately fungible and a genuine national obsession; murky symbioses between journalists and publicists grew more widespread and entrenched; and a sneering, clued-in, ''Sweet Smell'' cynicism about the quid pro quo bargains for fame and success became the standard American take. Hunsecker and Falco are monsters, but they're also pioneers, founding fathers of the world we inhabit now."

df/am

how bin laden got away
why bin laden used saudi hijackers
media notes
transporting nuclear waste
david brocks dramatic turn from right to left

Sunday, Mar 03, 2002

ill take manhattan

"For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S. officials believed that the worst nightmare of their lives�something even more horrific than 9/11�was about to come true. In October an intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies, including the Energy Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Search Team, based in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned to smuggle it into New York City."

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