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Editor's Letter
feature Another week, another massacre. Last week, a mentally ill young man armed with three handguns and a pump-action shotgun began firing inside a crowded auditorium at Northern Illinois University, but he managed to kill “only” five people and wound 16 before
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Editor's Letter
feature Hillary Clinton has accused Barack Obama of “plagiarism” for lifting several lines of a speech from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Obama’s defense is that Patrick is a friend who himself had urged Obama to use the passage—which, ironically enough, quot
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Editor's Letter
feature The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed are causing trouble again. First published by a Danish newspaper in 2005, the 12 satirical editorial cartoons were intended as a challenge to Islamic extremists: Don’t tell us what we can and can’t print. Some of the i
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Editor's Letter
feature Want proof that the TV writers’ strike is really over? Saturday Night Live is back in the controversy business. In its first new show of the year, SNL chose non-black cast member Fred Armisen to portray Barack Obama in a presidential debate skit. It wasn’
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Editor's Letter
feature My wife and I were surprised some years ago when my younger daughter, Jessica, was born with blue eyes. We both have brown. I remembered enough from high school biology to deduce that both of us had inherited a recessive blue-eye gene from our parents; in
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Editor's Letter
feature My good friends, I’m running for president. Let me enumerate just a few of the many reasons why I deserve your vote. I am, above all, the candidate of change, much more so than my opponents; indeed, if elected, I will change everything that you, the Ameri
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Editor's Letter
feature This election season has produced a strange disconnect. On the one hand, we’ve had the media narrative, propelled by breathless talk of “momentum” and “inevitability” and “collapses.” Then there are the voters. Remember last spring, when we were told that
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Editor's Letter
feature The world is coming to an end. Chicken Little was correct about this, if a bit premature; the only relevant questions are how, and when. The current conventional wisdom is that Doomsday will occur no later than 2 billion years hence, when the sun expands,
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Editor's Letter
feature Think about the upcoming Olympic Games in China, and you’re bound to think of Tibet. Pro-Tibetan activists have succeeded in making the Buddhist region, occupied by China since 1950, part of any conversation about the Beijing Olympics. Some of this global
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Editor's Letter
feature It’s harder than ever to find a spot on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a marketing opportunity. Everything from park benches to high school gymnasiums now comes with commercial sponsors, and ads have been popping up in restaurant bathrooms and even at
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Editor's Letter: Our chaotic times
feature I lifted my hand to wave, but her head was fixed straight ahead. All I could do was stand and watch as the ground beneath me registered a subtle quake.
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Editor's Letter: Online ads and precise optimization
feature Marketers are starting to employ a new technology, dubbed real-time bidding, that enables them to target messages based on what we’re doing online at that very moment.
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Editor's Letter: Human fallibility
feature Let us not put too much trust in those who navigate this world with smug certainty; the truly wise concede their fallibility up front, and keep learning from their mistakes.
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Editor's Letter: The upside to creative destruction
feature For music fans, there is an upside to creative destruction. On a Woodstock stage recently, I watched a friend stretch her lungs in some of the open space left by the industry’s retreat.
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