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Wednesday, Mar 20, 2002

joint taskforce

"A single glass of wine will impair your driving more than smoking a joint. And under certain test conditions, the complex way alcohol and cannabis combine to affect driving behaviour suggests that someone who has taken both may drive less recklessly than a person who is simply drunk."

superstoreroom

"Koolhaas has suggested that to avoid "the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious," Prada should create a series of "epicenters," or super-sized stores, each a distinct work of design. This seems sensible enough. A company that has based the aura of its brand on cutting-edge design might be well advised to think in terms of a cutting-edge environment. Alas, however, the first of these new stores, the Prada shop at 575 Broadway, in SoHo, is not a staggering reinvention of the retail environment, no matter what Koolhaas and his followers claim. The enormous new store, which cost somewhere in the neighborhood of forty million dollars, combines some hard-edged late modernism with some fancy technology (glass-enclosed dressing rooms that turn translucent at the touch of a button), and comes in a package that, like a lot of Koolhaas's work, mixes roughness with sleekness in a way that never manages to avoid seeming self-conscious. The architectural centerpiece is a set of zebrawood steps, like bleachers�what Koolhaas calls "the wave"�which descend from the street-level entry to the main selling floor, one level below. This creates both selling space and performing space, since the steps can be used as seating. But most of the time they are covered with shoes. What the wave does best is disguise the fact that most of this spectacular store is actually in the basement."

paper chaser

"This is one of the great puzzles of the modern workplace. Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance�the most common kind of office paper�rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk�or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips�arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives."

dressed for success

"The complete irrationality of violence has never been more clearly on display than in the Middle East this year, yet the grip of violence on the minds of Israeli and Palestinian leaders both could not be stronger. In America, meanwhile, we tell ourselves that our robust ''war on terrorism'' has gone well, yet the Israeli experience suggests how efficiently amoral terrorists are recruited out of the ruined pieces of nature that fall from ''overwhelming force.'' Israel's dilemma is a foretaste of America's: This great nation shall so wear out to naught."

no no noonan

"The hallmarks of the hero-worship style are a Manichaean moral sensibility, eloquent prose, and assertion rather than argument. This might seem like a harmless, even refreshing, counterpoint to the politics of personal destruction, which both parties now disdain as mindlessly partisan and corrosive to civic health. But Peggy Noonan's glorification of George W. Bush isn't a departure from the politics of personal destruction at all. It's the very same thing."

the comfortable way

"Mr. Chertoff�s toughness is exactly what�s needed as Enron and Andersen run for the hills. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Andersen executives have whined that the prosecutor is treating them like crime bosses. They seem to believe that because shredding documents wasn�t forbidden in the firm�s by-laws, they did nothing wrong. They are in for a rough education."

remember me

"Despite Saddam Hussein's biochemical assaults on Iranian troops and his own Kurdish population in the 1980s, his invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990, his repeated threats against Israel and the U.S., and his decades-long commitment to building a secret doomsday arsenal, he now poses little threat to the world, according to Halliday. Halliday proposes a nonviolent strategy for resolving tensions between America and Iraq. In addition to catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, he says, an invasion would create long-term problems for the United States in an already volatile region."

progressive reviewing

"Chomsky's newest book, 9-11, contains interviews he gave in the days following Sept. 11. In those interviews, Chomsky argues the unpopular position that the United States itself is a terrorist nation which supplies economic support and weaponry to some of the world's most hostile and repressive regimes in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. He notes that, not only has the United States both secretly and openly supported "terrorist" factions in Nicaragua, Columbia and Afghanistan, it also frequently and blatantly disregards international law. In 9-11, Chomsky asserts that war against Afghanistan in response to a terrorist attack violates United Nations guidelines. Under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, the United States should have sought action through the U.N. Security Council, a directive the Bush administration chose to ignore. Not only does Operation Enduring Freedom violate international law, it brings further destruction to an already war-ravaged, war-impoverished nation. As Chomsky foresaw in 9-11, "An attack in Afghanistan will probably kill a great many innocent civilians...in a country where millions are already on the verge of death from starvation. Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."

dont think

"The Israeli public � partly by choice � is living with a complete information blackout with regard to the extent of the damage and death taking place only a few kilometres away from their homes. Maybe the public doesn't want to know, but the media has a responsibility, which it has shirked," he wrote."

"More than five months after the United States launched a war in Afghanistan, there is no truce between the media and the Pentagon, with journalists continuing to voice frustration at the military's control over information."

chicken hawks

"AVOT�s avowed purpose, according to Bennett, is to "take to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing." Ah, but it may not be just a "misunderstanding" on the part of people like me � for example � who oppose a US policy of global intervention. A full-page ad taken out by AVOT in the New York Times denounced not only bin Laden & Co. but those Americans on the home front:

"Who are attempting to use this opportunity to promulgate their agenda of 'blame America first.' Both [internal and external] threats stem from either a hatred for the American ideals of freedom and equality or a misunderstanding of those ideals and their practice."

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