Jul 22, 09 | 11:31 AM
I keep reading that Henry Louis Gates Jr., the estimable Harvard scholar, has been the victim of racial profiling—arrested by clueless cops on his own front porch—and that this outrageous incident proves that even if the current occupant of the White House is a black male, we can forget "all that kumbaya crap," we are not living in a post-racial America . I’m certainly not a racial profiling denier, but there are a few things about this story that don’t add up. Did the neighbor lady really call the Cambridge cops that day because she saw...
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Jun 25, 09 | 9:11 PM
Boy, the avalanche of blogs and columns about Mark Sanford’s confession of marital infidelity yesterday have been almost as weird as the governor’s own bizarre, oversharing press conference itself. Sanford not only strayed off the script for politicians admitting they’ve sinned, he turned the script on its head. He said the pro-forma things—how many people he hurt, how sorry he was—but once he started spilling, you got the sense that what he was most cut up about wasn’t that he’d betrayed his wife or been caught with his pants down politically, but that...
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Jun 8, 09 | 4:51 PM
The bad news is that there’s a new Craigslist Killer. The good news—at least for Craigslist—is that it’s not a sexual predator who hunted victims in the website’s erotic listings. This time it’s a baby-crazed woman who apparently listed used baby clothing on the site to lure a pregnant woman to her house, and then butcher her in order to steal her almost-born child. Why good? Because you can’t blame the intermediary for this one. That is, unless you want to argue that selling or swapping baby clothes is inherently dangerous. Or that any listing that...
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May 30, 09 | 1:33 PM
The trend towards Americans shopping for religion, more or less the way we hunt for a house or a car—or, say, a pair of jeans that’s a perfect fit—took a strange step forward this week. A rather prominent and popular Catholic priest in Florida, caught canoodling on a beach with a dark-haired hottie, found an appropriately modern solution to his predicament: He became an Episcopalian . Alberto Cutié, a hunky Cuban-American dubbed Father Oprah for his empathetic advice on a Spanish-language radio call-in show, didn’t even go through the normal (if increasingly...
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May 28, 09 | 12:56 PM
Susan Boyle has got a mouth on her. Not just a spectacular set of pipes. For someone who's been living at home with Mum all her life, the frumpy British singing sensation—dubbed the Hairy Angel by indelicate Brits (they meant it as a term of endearment, really!)—may not be quite the angel she’s been made out to be. Thank God. Tuesday night she lost it in a hotel lounge when she heard her favorite judge, Piers Morgan, say on TV that her 12-year-old rival on Britain’s Got Talent put in the best performance of the second round. She flashed what was confusingly...
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May 27, 09 | 2:45 PM
Director Danny Boyle finally came to the rescue of the Slumdog Millionaire kids today—the kid actors that didn’t become millionaires, that is, but went back after dressing up for the Academy Awards to the Mumbai shanty homes they grew up in. The corrugated tin and cardboard shelters, that is, they lived in until they were demolished, over the last two weeks, along with most of their contents, by Indian authorities. First the world was treated to the vision of 9-year-old Azhar in tears in the scorching sun, clutching his salvaged Slumdog poster—signed...
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May 11, 09 | 10:10 AM
Carrie Prejean has two chances to be busted this week: Today the Miss California pageant producers decide whether to take away her tiara, and tomorrow Miss USA boss Donald Trump gets into the act, to rule on whether she’ll be stripped of her runner-up title. Hardly seems worth stripping someone of runner up, but then the Donald doesn’t like to miss a chance to fire the young and ambitious. What he ought to do is recognize that Miss USA is a pathetic anachronism and put it out of its misery, instead of Carrie Prejean. Prejean’s supposed crime is that she posed for...
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May 6, 09 | 7:54 PM
The male birth control pill, for decades the holy grail of sexual parity, is back on the radar screen thanks to some newly published Chinese research . Actually, it’s a shot. Of testosterone. In a 2-year test, more than 1,000 Chinese men were given monthly injections of the male hormone to make them, paradoxically, temporarily infertile. The shots proved to be 99% effective, giving them parity with birth control pills. It’s conspicuous that just about all the bloggers and commenters getting excited about this breakthrough around the web are women, not men. It’s women,...
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Apr 30, 09 | 2:22 PM
It seems that Miss California, the conservative right’s new standard-bearer for the sanctity of marriage, got an extra assist from the state pageant’s promoters in her recent failed run for Miss USA: They paid for her boob job. Could be in part why they’re so cross that she scotched her chances of winning by declaring herself an opponent of gay marriage. But more important: Is that kosher? If beauty pageant promoters can buy new breasts for their contestants, how’s that different from teams feeding steroids to their athletes? OK, steroids are banned and...
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Apr 22, 09 | 1:23 PM
The Supreme Court offered a real eye-opening example of cluelessness yesterday in wrestling with the case of Savana Redding, the 13-year-old strip-searched by high school administrators in search of prescription ibuprofen they suspected her of hiding in her underwear. The case began when the adults in charge of her Arizona middle school seemed so out of touch with—and even afraid of—their own students that they deployed a tactic straight out of a made-for-TV prison movie against an honors student over a legal drug that, as far as we know, might do something for...
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