Nov 24, 09 | 10:10 AM
Microsoft is a company that Rupert Murdoch understands. When he talks about the technology business or about the Internet or Google, which, on at least one occasion, I’ve heard him call Gadget, he invariably reverts to talking about Microsoft, which, on at least one occasion, I’ve heard him call IBM. What is Microsoft going to do? he asks, oddly echoing—indeed anticipating—Jeff Jarvis’ book, What Would Google Do? Murdoch’s question is, of course, a throwback one. He’s still thinking that Microsoft has all the answers, which it once did, that...
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Nov 23, 09 | 8:41 AM
A few years ago, writing about the book business and how dumbed down and craven books had become—and pathetic, designed only to sell and then not selling—I wrote the line “books suck,” subjecting me to much middlebrow opprobrium. I’d like to revise that line: Books are evil. They’re pernicious. They represent themselves as being one thing, when they’re insidiously the opposite. Sarah Palin, for instance, did not write her book and, what’s more, it is not meant to be read like you read a book. It’s a preposterous image, someone...
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Nov 20, 09 | 8:32 AM
My 84-year-old mother was full of venomous indignation at dinner last night over the great mammogram take-back. Bureaucrats, in her view, will happily kill women to save money. My colleague, Caroline Miller, Newser’s editor in chief, took umbrage in this space the other day about the new guidelines. She noted the obvious cold efficiencies involved with discouraging younger women from having a yearly mammogram, as well as the “patronizing” justification for the new approach: that it will save women from the psychological distress of a false-positive test result. And then,...
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Nov 19, 09 | 10:14 AM
This is a phenomenon that just keeps giving. Its very lack of explanation, and ensuing incredulity and apoplexy, propel it. There may not have ever been anything like it in modern American politics. Well, Ronald Reagan perhaps. But his was, at least, a 20-year phenomenon. In little more than a year, Sarah Palin has gone from zero status to significant opposition leader, contender for the leadership of her party, and one of the most extraordinary media figures in the country. It is hard to catch up with her. She moves too fast to study. Beside the expressions of incredulity and apoplexy,...
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Nov 18, 09 | 2:40 PM
No one likes to get a mammogram. Still, it’s hard to find a woman anywhere who was pleased to hear the new ruling that women in their 40s don’t need to endure the annual indignity of baring their breasts to the radiologist after all. That’s because it’s hard to find a woman anywhere who believes that the federal panel changed its recommendation for her benefit. It’s not that the decision doesn’t make sense: It costs a lot to screen women for breast cancer in their 40s, and very few actually have it—something like 1.4%. At the same time,...
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Nov 18, 09 | 8:43 AM
For all sorts of obvious reasons, it seems like a greatly unacceptable and possibly discriminatory thing to say that the obese are a lot like the Chinese (though it’s unclear which group, if either, is being slurred). But hear me out. It is simple math. In eight years, according to a new study released yesterday, 43% of Americans will be officially obese (not just fat, mind you, but off many scales). Likewise, the vast number of Chinese people, with their new economic muscle, have become a difficult, unsettling, unexpected, and impossible-to-avoid presence in the world. Obese people,...
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Nov 17, 09 | 6:50 AM
If Arthur Miller were at it again, he’d call the play Death of a PR Guy. Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s PR guy who got the ax yesterday, used to beg me not to call him a PR Guy—his official title was Executive VP of Global Marketing and Corporate Affairs—but that was his job: making Murdoch look good. If not good, less bad. Here’s the job description: Take one of the least sympathetic people on earth—cold, hostile, mean, old, almost pathologically opportunistic, and basically unconcerned with what anybody thinks about him—and run behind him...
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Nov 16, 09 | 12:30 PM
President Obama needs to get the hell out of China as fast as he can, rush back to America and start hugging Republicans. This will guarantee him a huge majority in Congress next election. No more worrying about scraping up 60 votes. No more sleepless nights for Harry Reid. Starting in January 2011, every Democratic bill sails right through. The evidence is right there on page one of today’s New York Times. It’s the sad, sad saga of Charlie Crist, governor of Florida. Crist, a Republican, is now running for the Senate and was viewed as a shoo-in, according to the...
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Nov 16, 09 | 8:01 AM
“First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. I notice that young people—you know, they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone. But I’m a big believer in technology, and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information.” That’s what the president said upon his arrival today in Shanghai as he took questions from Chinese university students, one of whom asked: “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” So what’s his point? I mean it certainly...
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Nov 13, 09 | 6:55 AM
Nobody I know who is smart and rich (albeit much less rich than they used to be) thinks the economy is patched up and ready to roll—except, apparently, Warren Buffet (who I don’t actually know), who announced yesterday that “the financial panic is behind us.” But then he is also a man who believes the future is railroads. The view of my personal focus group of the smart and the rich is a basic one: Their own businesses continue to really suck; some 17% of the country is unemployed or under-employed in an economy built on consumer spending; every bank in the country...
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