This photo makes me laugh so much. It ran on the front page of the NY Times, and shows Specialist Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, TX fighting in Afghanistan in his pink boxers. He had been sleeping when the compound he was in was attacked, and he ran out to help fight in [...]

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I love looking at NY Times photos. They have a certain sophistication, a sense of subtlety that is matched by few other publications. It’s a testament, not only to their photographers but also to their photo editors. That is the kind of photography I would like to see myself doing in the [...]

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Photo by Jim Wilson / New York Times
Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.
In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock [...]

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A three-year-old boy called Adolf Hitler Campbell has been refused a birthday cake with his name on it by a New Jersey supermarket.
Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife, Deborah, 25, say they are upset at the decision made by their local ShopRite not to write “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” across the cake, and that people [...]

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“I think if we didn’t say ’shortie’ for the next hundred years, I don’t know how that’s going to help things, but I’m just certain that it will.  I just have that feeling in my heart.”
- Mos Def

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Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, [...]

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Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped [...]

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My children believe in heroes. I want heroes too, but real life gets in the way. How can I watch China’s Olympic divers without recalling the reports that some are competing with injuries, sacrificing themselves for national pride, and a chance at an apartment? How can I watch the runners’ rippling bodies without remembering Marion [...]

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I understand the idea of “standards-based” education. I embrace the need to hold teachers in low-income schools to the same standards as teachers who work with more privileged children.
But the standards to which I’m being held here are not high standards; they are just a high pile of standards, a mountain of detritus generated by [...]

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He flip-flopped on abortion and same-sex marriage; he is now pro-life and opposes both same-sex marriage and civil unions. However, much of the white evangelical opposition to Mr. Romney is not based on principle. It is simply old-fashioned bigotry – a discomfort with Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith. White evangelicals need to be reminded that this [...]

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The few seconds of mild shaking during Tuesday’s earthquake didn’t do much damage, but CNN’s coverage did. My daily productivity was cut in half when I had to spend all afternoon answering calls and e-mails from my parents, grandmother, cousins and everyone else I know on the East Coast to tell them I was a [...]

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Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper’s Beijing bureau chief, I’ve been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually [...]

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Attending the awards ceremony in the spring at our high school (not TJ) for example, the Asian students carried off a huge number of the awards in nearly all subjects and completely flattened everyone else in math and science.
It’s so unfair. These Asian students, some of whom only arrived in this country within the last [...]

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Noble: Federal Judge Ronald Leighton of Takoma, Wash., for fighting legal verbiage with a limerick and the law after a plaintiff’s massive plaint.
Mounds of verbal ballast can mean a win for the rule of lawyers and a defeat for the rule of law. But federal Judge Ronald Leighton prefers justice’s twin handmaidens of clarity and [...]

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Photographers like to say that when they place the camera to their eye, it acts as both a physical and mental barrier to what’s going on around them — that somehow the camera can be a shield between you and the awful scenes taking place in front of you. The fatal flaw in that thinking [...]

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