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Editor's Letter
feature For the first time since I set my heart on a Wham-O Air Blaster back in 1962, I know exactly what I want for Christmas: A cell phone jammer. It’s the hot gift item this year, The New York Times reports, with one British manufacturer logging more than 2,00
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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 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 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 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
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 Thomas Jefferson may have impregnated one of his slaves. Warren Harding had liaisons with his mistress in an Oval Office closet. FDR’s mistress—one of two during his marriage—was with him when he died.
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Editor's Letter
feature As the foundations beneath the home-mortgage industry were eroding last week, I watched the Atlantic engage in give and take with the Jersey shore.
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Editor's Letter
feature TWA Flight 800 was just 16 minutes out of JFK Airport on a clear July night when a short circuit ignited the gasoline vapors in the center fuel tank, ripping the plane’s belly open and blowing off its nose and cockpit.
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Editor's Letter
feature “Time is but the stream I go fishing in,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. Apparently the guy didn’t commute. For the 125 million Americans who do, time is less an amiable stream than a daily tsunami threatening to over
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Editor's Letter
feature Janet Jackson’s right breast was back in the news last week. It first achieved international infamy, of course, for being briefly exposed during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.
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Editor's Letter
feature It’s a Sunday morning Effron family tradition, and it even has a name—“foraging.”
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Editor's Letter
feature In my mind’s eye, he’ll always be the angular, wavy-haired superstar in a bespoke suit that he was in his prime—not the pathetic, stateless, wild-bearded anti-Semite that he devolved into. In remembering Bobby Fischer this way, I know I’m romanticizing hi
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