'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
The prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson observed, "concentrates the mind wonderfully." We're counting on that kind of concentration to keep us from falling off the infamous "fiscal cliff."
Wendy Weil, a beloved literary agent known for her low-key but determined style and for an eclectic clientele of groundbreaking and best-selling authors, from Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown to Fannie Flagg and Mark Helprin, has died. She was 72.
Conservatives love to hate Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist who wrote his last political column on Sunday, but they owe him an accolade or two for recognizing what the relentless production of opinion was doing to his writing. (Other pundits, please copy.) "That routine can push you to have stronger opinions than you actually have, or contrived opinions about subjects you may not care deeply about, or to run roughshod over nuance to reach an unambitious conclusion," he wrote in his farewell to rage and all that. He's moving to fresh adventures at New York magazine, where he hopes to rediscover nuance, which he displayed in thoughtful abundance in "Ghost Light," his memoir about growing up in Washington, D.C.
A prominent national defense consultant was seen alive in downtown Wilmington less than 24 hours before his body was found in a load of trash at a landfill, police said Tuesday.
Masters of disaster
"For decades," writes James Fallows in The Atlantic magazine, "every trend in manufacturing favored the developing world and worked against the United States.
"With each passing month, people can get more of what they want and less of what someone else thinks they should have," he writes in Atlantic magazine.
