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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
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."
super soaker
"Call off the dogs please. I surrender. I apologize. I am chastened and will never use "hot tub"and "Marin County" in the same sentence again. Though you yourself in "Reader's Forum" recognized that others have used the "hot tub" analogy, I shouldn't have done it."
time sluts
abc has a new comedy about network executives called Wednesday 9:30/8:30 Central
rules of engagement
"If Carp's evaluation is correct, it seems that when a President is - as President Bush is now - forced to deal with a politically divided government, the quality of his judicial appointees may markedly increase. Automatic confirmation may be not a luxury, but a threat; it tends to send the political hacks and ideologues onto the bench, and keep the better jurists off."
zoned in
"Atlanta is at the forefront of a widespread movement to update zoning codes. The theories that propelled some of the codes stem from before the Eisenhower administration, at a time when the advent of the car became the single most important factor influencing land-use policy.
"The postwar planning initiatives had a real blossoming of the notion of separation of land uses and were responding to the car, which was the new thing that everyone was really excited by," Dobbins said.
"The tried and true, centuries-old sets of relations between people and their buildings were ignored," Dobbins said. "Zoning ordinances actually encouraged and induced this phenomenum of a building sitting in a sea of asphalt, accessible by car."
Times have changed."
polished apple
museum of the city of new york
fair play
whats the plan
Pathways in American Planning History: A Thematic Chronology