rakemag Paulette writes: Rake, Rake — whose got my Rake. Well, I have two men on vacation in Sayulita Mexico, vying for a Rake read. They had to take turns. Here are pix of both sitting on a palapa at the top of “gringo hill” — there’s no specific evidence of place, but you can see … Read more
Kristina Larsson always wanted to dance, but she was turned off by the phony smiles she saw fixed on the faces of most performers. “When I saw flamenco, I thought, ‘Wow! They’re not smiling!’” she says. It was that subtle epiphany that helped this Minnesotan fall in love with a dance associated with the sultry … Read more
Will wonders never cease? The conservative columnist of the NY Times, David Brooks, came to the defense of Newsweek today. Brooks takes note of the fact that radical Islamists hardly need a short item in an American magazine with an excellent reputation to incite them to senseless violence against almost everyone. He doesn’t actually put … Read more
Can you give me some advice on how to deal with Woodward and Bernstein? I had the opportunity to have lunch with an editor of the Beijing English language daily newspaper China Daily on Sunday. He was in town as part of an exchange program for Asian journalists to see how we do it over … Read more
In the book Freakonomics that I mentioned the other day, there’s a chapter called “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?”. In it, author Steven Levitt examines various theories of why violent crime has decreased in the country. Many explanations are examined: more prisons, more police, better policing strategies, aging population, stronger economy, and gun laws. … Read more
If we needed more evidence that the religious right’s nincompoops are profoundly dangerous, here you go. It seems they are right here in Minnesota, intimidating weak-kneed school administrators into preventing the introduction of the idea of evolution in Montecello. St. Paul author Lisa Westberg Peters has written a book for children called “Our Family Tree” … Read more
I’m reading the book Freakonomics by a University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt. In one chapter he talks about an entrepreneur who sets up a business of selling bagels on the honor system in the offices of several companies. By analysing who pays for the bagels and who takes them without paying, Levitt draws … Read more
Don’t worry about National Socialist Security It’s getting more difficult to sort out the NY Times’ David Brooks’ columns when you try to rank them in order of how much they are beginning to remind me of the old Nazi adage “Just repeat the lie; it will become the truth.” Yesterday’s column, in which he … Read more
In God We Trust If you haven’t read the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Frank yet, you can get a preview in today’s NY Times story on the Kansas Board of Education’s impending mandate that evolution be taught side by side with “intelligent design” in Kansas science classes. The irony hasn’t been … Read more
The Latin poet Horace wrote this as the final poem of the third book of his Odes. (He later published a fourth book. We had one of those poems earlier.) Horace’s poetry has been the inspiration for poets through the ages. Dante, Dryden, Housman, Yeats and Auden all cribbed from him. He was the one … Read more