text:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) administration announced Monday morning that it will drop its challenge to a court decision legalizing gay marriage – a decision that assures that same-sex marriages that were set to be performed starting Monday will be valid going forward.
The case was set to be argued in January, but the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Friday that same-sex couples could wed starting Monday.
In its ruling, the court also suggested that the Christie administration's case was unlikely to succeed – a fact that Christie's office cited while dropping its case Monday.
"Chief Justice Rabner left no ambiguity about the unanimous court's view on the ultimate decision in this matter when he wrote, 'same-sex couples who cannot marry are not treated equally under the law today,'" the Christie administration said in a statement.
It continued: "Although the Governor strongly disagrees with the Court substituting its judgment for the constitutional process of the elected branches or a vote of the people, the Court has now spoken clearly as to their view of the New Jersey Constitution and, therefore, same-sex marriage is the law."
Udi Ofer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said this means the court case is "essentially done."
"This was an unexpected but amazing gift to the gay and lesbian couples who tied the knot at the stroke of midnight when they weren't sure those marriages were going to be permanent," he said.
For more, see Reid Wilson's report on GovBeat.


text:
Before leaving Norfolk, we tried to determine what caused anxiety in offshore sailing. Our hope was to identify and then deal with these issues up front, before they had a chance to affect us on our journey.
I looked at accounts of high seas rescue situations involving boats caught in offshore storms. In most cases, the rescued sailors agreed that it was crew failure that ultimately caused the emergency and subsequent evacuation. Present in most rescue operations were three primary issues: fatigue, seasickness, and boat-handling ability.
Although Sue and I do not expect to be caught in an offshore storm and have to abandon ship, we do want to be prepared for any conditions we may encounter. We also recognized that these same factors would directly influence not just our safety, but also our comfort and subsequent anxiety level--even if the seas never top three feet.
First, we addressed fatigue. We saw fatigue as being composed of two basic elements: sleep and nutrition. As for sleep, we established a four-hour watch schedule aboard Safari. We both considered this schedule to be serious, and we stuck to it throughout the day and night. To compensate for lost sleep at night, we forced ourselves to sleep some during the day. This was not always easy. On a prior overnight sail, I stayed awake most of the night. This left me exhausted and unable to function the next day. Another time, Sue and I tried two-hour watches but found the time too short for adequate rest.
Before leaving, we prepared all our food in advance. This we stored in ready-to-serve portions that could be eaten cold, or would require only simple heating. Anyone who has spent time in rough seas knows how tough it can be to work down below in a galley. In fact, I sometimes find it challenging in a gourmet kitchen on land!
Do we get seasick? Unfortunately, yes. Sue and I are both prone to seasickness in certain conditions. We are, however, learning how to control it. We have found that the active ingredient in Bonine and Dramamine II, meclizine hydrochloride 25 mgs, works great without causing drowsiness. If you want to fall asleep fast, take the regular Dramamine. They should market this product as a sleep pill. Sue took this once two years ago on a trip and slept for six hours. Other sailors have reported similar side effects. This could be dangerous if you needed your crew to help you offshore in deteriorating conditions. We also have in our medical bag the prescription product Transderm Scop. This is a patch product that you place behind your ear that lasts up to three days. We have not found ourselves in conditions to warrant using these yet.
When you stop and think bout it, sailing overnight with only two people aboard is a lot like single-handing. One person sails the boat alone, while the other person rests. This, of course, requires boat-handling skills from both crew members. Since the off-watch person must genuinely rest, the on-watch crew member must be competent and comfortable operating the vessel alone.
Aboard Safari, Sue and I try to share responsibilities equally. Each of us now has the confidence and ability to single-hand under most conditions. Im fortunate that Sue was already an experienced sailor before we met. Actually, she has more sailing experience than I do. The down side to Sues experience is that I cant boss her around like a lot of guys do their wives. There are also times when two captains aboard make for some interesting discussions. Oh well, you cant have everything.
Weve talked with other cruising couples who told us of their anxiety and concerns regarding offshore sailing, particularly at night. In most cases, one of the two is not comfortable handling the boat. One woman told us that she never takes her eyes off the radar screen while on watch, ready to awaken her sleeping husband if a blip occurs. As a result, her journey is stressful and unpleasant. Not surprisingly, she does not want to go offshore at night again.
Well, enough of this serious stuff. I guess Ive found that when you are prepared for the worst, the good times are even that much better. My watch just finished and I really must get some sleep. I lay in my bunk, confident that Safari, now 50 miles offshore, is under command with Sue at the helm and heading safely toward Buzzards Bay. I have four hours before my next watch. I drift quickly into a deep comfortable sleep ...
Here is a quick list of some of the cruising guides we have on board for our cruise.
Reeds Nautical Almanac-North American East CoastPublisher: Thomas Reed PublicationsContents: Overview of inlets, lat/long of major navigational aids, tides and currents for virtually every location (Bahamas and Bermuda included), radio frequencies and times for weather broadcasts.Comments: This is not a cruising guide, but an invaluable reference that no boater should be without. We probably use this book more than any other in our cruising.
Cruising Guide to Eastern Florida & Cruising Guide to South Carolina and GeorgiaAuthor: Claiborne S. YoungPublisher: John F. Blair, Winston-Salem, North CarolinaContents: Covers primarily Intracoastal Waterway navigational information, with anchorages and marinas. Provides history of each area, along with photos and sketches. Discusses navigability of most inlets along the coast.Comments: These are good guides to have aboard. We find that it has almost all of the information that you need, but it is not always easy to find specific information quickly. We like the fact that there is no advertising in this reference book.
Southern Waterway Guide, Mid-Atlantic Waterway Guide & Northern Waterway GuidePublisher: Intertec PublishingContents: Southern (all of Florida, the Bahamas and the Gulf Coast to Mexico) mid-Atlantic (Chesapeake Bay to northern Florida), northern (New England coast, Long Island Sound, Hudson River and the Triangle Loop) and lots of marina information and advertising in these publications. Covers most navigation and anchoring information needed for each area, as well as shore facilities.Comments: Probably used by more boaters than any other guide. If you only want to buy three guides to take you from Maine to Mexico, these would be the ones. We found them our least favorite as they are oriented towards spending money at marinas. Every other page is a full-page advertisement.
A Cruising Guide to the Maine CoastAuthor: Hanke and Jan TaftPublisher: Diamond Pass Publishing, Inc., Peaks Island, Maine.Contents: Covers the entire coast of Maine and connecting parts of New BrunswickComments: The best cruising guidebook we've ever seen. Every other guidebook writer would do well to reorganize all of their information into the same clear, logical and useful manner in which this book is done. The guide covers just about every nook and cranny of Maine you would want to try and visit, and rates each one as to beauty, interest, safe harbor, etc. It also covers interesting history of some of the ports and describes in detail much of the wildlife you will see from your boat.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Kevin Kidney has posted several funable and friendlyable vintage Disney newspaper ads.
And a few more links:
1. Real life hobbit house in Wales. Via.
2. Princess Peach cosplay.
3. At my Coraline site Evil Buttons, Coraline's plush button squid.
4. Article about a small Ohio town that relied on DHL as an employer and is now suffering from massive layoffs. One worker named Keith Rider describes the lost job:
We could tell you what we did on a daily basis, but you wouldn't believe it. You know, boxes in a big container, and it'll weigh 800 pounds, you push it out the door through eight inches of snow, and push it up on a barge, and we were idiots enough that we did it by ourselves. We worked as a team, and we had a good friend right along side of us."Read the rest of the long article here.
*Previously: Armored Samus cosplay.
*Buy "Style Deficit Disorder: Harajuku Street Fashion" at Amazon.


text:
"I couldn't have been happier with the quality of the paper, printing, how the photos turned out....everything was exactly as I'd hoped. I will continue to use Tiny Prints for any special occasion invitation."
"Friends loved the invitation. They especially liked the back of the invitation, where I had put 3 photos of my son when he was younger. The design was nice for an 18 year old boy - not too fancy, not too girly...."
"This design offers a great presentation for a party announcement and allowed several options on the back for 1, 2, or 3 photos with or without captions. We are very pleased with the final product. I ordered these just after midnight on a Thursday and they arrived at my door around 3 pm on Friday. That is very impressive!"
"I love this announcement. It looks very nice and after a few tries I was able to get everything I wanted to say to fit . Apparently you can only have a certain amount of words and I had to make the font smaller but it still came out beautiful. I originally picked only one picture but after reviewing it I would definitely suggest you also put another pic on the back because if not it just doesn't look right."
"This is my first time using Tiny Prints and I highly reccomend it!!! The service was easy to use and delivery was right on time! The expert review helped me fix a few flaws in the picture so that was a tremendous help! I am definitley shopping here again!"
Copyright © 2004-2017 Shutterfly, Inc | Tiny Prints | Terms of Use. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.


text:
It only takes a minute to get started. Fill out our simple sign up form and login to the site.
This step is elective but will drastically increase your chances of receiving views from other daters on the website. Write a little about yourself, your pasttimes and upload a nice photo of yourself.
Use our website's advanced search to spot members who meet your requirements. Or just flip through listings and spot folks that you find attractive.
Identified someone who ticks all the boxes? Send them a message or just a wink and take it from there. With a little luck you'll be on your way to discovering your ideal date.
It only takes a few minutes


text:
With the number of complaints, Motorola and Verizon do have an issue on its hands. The launch had seemingly been accomplished without any problems and for the most part, the phone had been well-reviewed with most users saying that it had been worth the wait. From Motorola's point of view, the company has to be concerned that Verizon has the Google Nexus Prime coming, possibly on November 3rd as we reported. If the Motorola DROID BIONIC is to remain a competitive choice for Verizon customers, this problem needs to be nipped in the bud, now, especially since it is Verizon's first dual-core LTE device.
If you are a Motorola DROID BIONIC owner and have been affected by this high-pitched noise, drop us a comment in the box below.
source: MotorolaOwner'sForum, Xdadevelopers via Engadget


text:
Abu Ringer Women T-Shirts are an Idakoos specialtiy! Idakoos has many things to offer. Whether you want to get a Abu Ringer Women T-Shirt for a special occasion, give a Abu Women T-Shirt as a present or need to represent with a funny Abu Ringer Tee during Holidays or Family and Friends get-togethers, Idakoos is sure to have the right Abu Ringer Women T-Shirt for you! Even if it turns out you can't find the right Abu Ringer Shirt with the perfect design for your mother, father or children (or friends!); Idakoos offers all of its men's women's and children's Abu Ringer Women T-Shirts as Custom Abu Women T-Shirts. Personalize any Abu Ringer Women T-Shirt the way you want to ensure the perfect gift.
Showing 1 - 24 of 120 Women Ringer T-Shirt


text:
Together, we can reduce pet homelessness and animal suffering.
A career at the Dumb Friends League is challenging. Our work to make our community a better place for animals and people has many rewards.
Dumb Friends League employees, based in Denver, Castle Rock and Franktown, Colorado, are a dedicated group of people committed to animal welfare, and we are always looking to add talented individuals to our team.
In addition to competitive salaries, we offer a comprehensive benefits package to our full-time staff members. Our benefits are designed to help our staff lead healthy, productive and rewarding lifestyles. They include:
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Basic and voluntary supplemental life insurance
- Long-term disability insurance
- Flex spending accounts
- 401(k) retirement option with League matching contributions*
- Voluntary short-term disability insurance
- Personal time off (PTO)*
- Employee assistance program
- Bank-at-work and direct deposit options*
- Discounts on supplies and limited veterinary services*
*Benefits offered to part-time employees (minimum 20 hours/week)
If you are interested in joining our team, please complete our online application. Resumes and cover letters should be uploaded through our online application. Thank you for your interest!
The Dumb Friends League is committed to providing a safe and drug-free work environment. All offers will be made contingent upon successful completion of a pre-employment criminal background check (including driving record if the position requires the operation of a vehicle) and drug test. The League does conduct drug testing for existing employees for reasonable suspicion and post-workplace accidents.
For best results, please use Firefox or Google Chrome to complete your application.


text:
January 3, 2012
Market News International
John Shaw
Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, said the "fundamental dilemma" that lawmakers will face this year is the competing desires to secure some policy accomplishments versus making sharp distinctions with the other party as the November presidential and congressional elections approach.
"I suspect we will have a contentious year in which very little will get done on the fiscal front. We'll have all the problems we had last year which will get further complicated by the overlay of presidential and congressional elections," Bixby said.


text:
|You are in: Business
Wednesday, 27 February, 2002, 07:10 GMT
UK business start-ups down again
The number of UK business start-ups has fallen again, but there are signs that entrepreneurs are regaining their confidence, according to a closely-watched survey.
The number of people launching their own businesses during the final three months of 2001 fell by just 6% compared with the same period a year earlier, Barclays bank said on Wednesday.
That compares with an on-year decline of 27% during the October to December period 2000.
And business starts in the manufacturing sector registered a surprise 14% increase, adding to recent evidence that British industry is poised for recovery.
Outlook 'improving'
"These figures are quite encouraging, showing signs of recovery in the UK after what has been a particularly tough year for entrepreneurs," said Barclays managing director of small business and start-ups Mike Rogers.
"Looking ahead, we are optimistic about people's resilience to these challenging times."
However, the figures confirm that a recent slowdown in the services sector is being felt at grass-roots level, with computer and professional service start-ups plummeting by 48% and 36% respectively.
And regions where entrepreneurial activity thrived during the late 1990s boom are now lagging behind, with business start-ups in the south-east tumbling by 18%.
In contrast, new business launches fell by just 6% in the West Midlands, and remained stable in Yorkshire.
The foot and mouth crisis and the impact of the 11 September attacks made 2001 one of the most difficult years on record for British entrepreneurs.
See also:
02 Nov 01 | England
Foot-and-mouth fears fade
10 Jul 01 | Business
Revenue targets small firms
11 Jun 01 | Business
Small business hit by climate change levy
20 Mar 01 | Northern Ireland
Security grants offered to small businesses
07 Mar 01 | Budget 2001
Tax cuts target small business
12 Feb 01 | Business
Small business finds new optimism
27 Nov 00 | Scotland
Banks 'in the red' over service
Internet links:
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
Top Business stories now:
Links to more Business stories are at the foot of the page.
Links to more Business stories
|^^ Back to top
News Front Page | World | UK | UK Politics | Business | Sci/Tech | Health | Education | Entertainment | Talking Point | In Depth | AudioVideo
To BBC Sport>> | To BBC Weather>>
© MMIII | News Sources | Privacy


text:
Inter step up chase for Bologna star
Inter are reportedly eyeing a move for Bologna's Alessandro Diamanti.
The 29-year-old has been in fantastic form for the Rossoblu this season, scoring seven goals in matches.
According to Tuttomercatoweb, the Nerazzurri are looking to bring Diamanti to the San Siro during the summer transfer window.
It is thought Inter are willing to double his €1 million a season salary in order to secure his signature.


text:
Hey everything I that I want is in that first post. I would be interesting is seeing what you have and if it is just html then yes I would want a cms but I could make it. If you have something like that for wordpress and it is just what I am looking for then I could buy a bunch of license because I have clients who are asking me for something like what I posted.
mafloral said
Hey Are you lloking for a WP theme or just the html template without the CMS? If you are just looking for the template i have some cool and original html5 templates in my TF portfolio. As i said i will have all my templates as WP versions also.
So check back often.
Good on you Lester. Let me know.
Hi mafloral,
Thanks for posting. I checked out your templates and though they are dope, I would still have to customize to the studio. That is why I am hoping for someone to think about that niche and make a template meant for a recording studio. I would make it, but I am not familiar with wordpress that much yet. I could make the HTML but then I know I would be bugged by the engineers to change this and that hence I want to give them something they can edit.
I have bookmarked your templates though because the engineers are always introducing me to their clients who want something by the next day.. lol
Hello TMF,
I have been looking everywhere for a Recording Studio theme. I see a lot of themes for Artist, DJ, Label and kinda mushing them all together, but I am requesting a Recording Studio theme. I have found a few on sites like CBMcard and TemplateMoster sites, but they are either flash or half @ssed wannabe HTML5 and go for around 70 bucks.
Here are some of the features I would like the theme to have basically, followed by some extra features. 1. Top page with sliders for pictures. 2. About Studio Page 3. Services offered ie; Recording, mastering, BGM, Composition, promotion, distribution etc 4. Rates: ie per hour with or without engineer, or studio lockout for the day 5. Equipment list section 6. Contact with map.
Extras. Responsive (not almost responsive like a lot of the themes lately) Twitter feed that is viewable on all sections, Facebook page like box possibly in the footer, maybe a Instagram widget for recording session photos. Small little section to promote the latest recordings and artists maybe with the iTunes affiliate linkshare.
I know the current music themes available could be made to do the above, but I just would like to see one targeted for Recording Studios and the engineers that run them. I think the first person to really take advantage of this will be at the TOP of the search engine for Recording Studio WP themes and or WP Themes for Recording Studios. I would do it if I wasn't just figuring out Visual Composer, but I don't want to embarrass myself
Thanks for reading all and let me know if you create something wonderful. @rascals if you are reading this by all means PLEASE.


text:
treat yourself right!
Shelby is an international traveler, travel agent and group travel specialist. She is the mastermind and driving force behind two rapidly expanding travel business machines called Daycation Tours and Travel Dudes & Dolls Travel Club, with locations in Alabama and Georgia.
She specializes in Domestic and International Group Travel, Day Trips, HBCU Classic Football Tailgaiting, College Cruise, Family Reunions, Destination Weddings and so much more.
Don't be left out of all the fun. Call or email Shelby today.
706-538-3655 or firstname.lastname@example.com
The Travel Doll
PO Box 9382


text:
Studio 360
Leonardo DiCaprio & Ben Stiller
5 segments
Leonardo DiCaprio talks with Kurt Andersen about how much greed is good — he stars in Martin Scorsese's new film The Wolf of Wall Street. Ben Stiller brings Walter Mitty's daydreams to the screen in the feel-good movie of the season. And we revisit the golden age of musical theater productions that never saw the footlights of Broadway.


text:
Tweets from @TBHomeTeam/writers
MORE from our HomeTeam writers.
Wed. March 17, 2010 | Eduardo A. Encina
Plant City sophomore quarterback Bennie Coney has been invited to participate in Steve Clarkson's Dreammaker Showcase at the Orlando Citrus Bowl on April 10, Raiders coach Jason Strunk said.
Clarkson -- a private quarterback tutor who has mentored the likes of Ben Roethlisberger, Jimmy Clausen, Jake Locker, Matt Barkley, Matt Leinart and Terrelle Pryor -- is holding showcases in 15 cities across the country.
Coney threw for 1,609 yards and 14 touchdown passes as a sophomore. He also ran for 289 yards and 7 scores.
Players in Orlando will be evaluated by Clarkson as well as ESPN recruiting analysts Tom Luginbill and Mike Gleason. Top performers will be selected to participate in this summer's Steve Clarkson Super 7 Maui Retreat in Hawaii, where they will work with the quarterbacks like Joe Montana, Warren Moon, Roethlisberger and Leinart.
Jefferson's Quentin Williams is also slated to participate in the event.


text:
German plants achieve ISO-50001 certification
In November 2011, energy experts at ADM's Mainz, Hamburg, Spyck, Straubing, and Noblee/Thoerl oilseeds facilities and our Mannheim cocoa-processing plant came together to develop an energy management system consistent with the ISO-50001 international standard, which encourages more efficient energy use. The system they developed formalized energy-management processes and procedures; established clear, measurable performance indicators; and sought to increase energy awareness among employees at each facility. By May 2012, the facilities had achieved ISO-50001 certification. ADM energy director Thomas Mort noted that the team's efforts will generate substantial environmental benefits. "When we use less energy, we produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions," Mort explained. "So our teams' work is helping ADM demonstrate our commitment to reducing our environmental impact."
Previous Page
ADM's Hamburg oilseeds processing complex was one of several German facilities to receive ISO-50001 certification.
Next Page


text:
Baseball's award-winners will be named throughout this month, culminating Tuesday with the American League MVP. To coincide with each award's release, the Daily Pitch will break down the field and forecast the winner in advance of the 2 p.m. ET announcement.
Today: NL MVP
Traditional favorite: Reds first baseman Joey Votto, Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols and Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez each put up big numbers as they contended for the Triple Crown. Pujols, however, is a three-time winner of the award, including the last two seasons. He led the NL in homers (42) and RBI (118) and was sixth in batting average (.312).
Sabermetric favorite: Votto, who helped the Reds to the NL Central title, finished in the top three in all Triple Crown categories, compiling a .324 average (2nd in NL) with 37 homers (3rd) and 113 RBI (3rd). More importantly, the first-time All-Star led the league with a 1.024 OPS.
Dark horse: Gonzalez, who led the NL in batting average (.336), hit .387 with 17 homers and 55 RBIs in his final 59 games. But his dramatic home-road splits worked against him.
USA TODAY's Bob Nightengale cast a ballot to the Baseball Writers' Association of America:
Ballot: 1. Joey Votto, Cincinnati; 2. Carlos Gonzalez, Colorado; 3. Albert Pujols, St. Louis; 4. Adrian Gonzalez, San Diego; 5. Aubrey Huff, San Francisco; 6. Troy Tulowitzki, Colorado; 7. Roy Halladay, Philadelphia; 8. Jason Werth, Philadelphia; 9. Martin Prado, Atlanta; 10. Adam Dunn, Washington
Ballot explanation: It's an absolute no-brainer. Cincinnati Reds first baseman Joey Votto is easily the MVP choice.
His numbers may not be dramatically different than that of St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols or Colorado Rockies outfielder Carlos Gonzalez. Votto, who led the league with a .600 slugging percentage and .424 on-base percentage, batted .324 with 37 homers and 113 RBI. Pujols hit .312 with 42 homers and 118 RBI. And Gonzalez hit a league-leading .336 with 34 homers.
Yet, there is one massive distinction.
Votto led his team to the postseason. The Reds won their first NL Central title since 1995. The Cardinals and Rockies sat home.
Case closed.
Daily Pitch is a baseball fan's destination for breaking news, emerging trends and enlightening banter. With a veteran group of reporters positioned in three time zones, we provide a balanced, comprehensive glimpse at our national pastime, with a nod to both the passion and complexities that make the sport irresistible to many. More about our reporters


text:
Can an employer make employees pay for cash register shortages?
Question Details:
My ex-employer made waitstaff pay for cash register shortages and ticket errors out of their own pocket without written consent.
The general rule is that as long as the employee still earns at least the minimum wage after such a deduction, there's no rule against charging an employee for a shortage. This is true so long as this has been existing company policy. If it is a new policy, the employee can only be charged for shortages after the new policy went into effect (i.e. not retroactively). However, some states require employers to get the employee's written consent before they can make this type of deduction from the employee's paycheck. And a few states only allow such deductions from an employee who assumes responsibility for the loss or unless the employer can show that the employee acted dishonestly or negligently.
So unless you have an employment contract or union agreement that prohibits an employee from being held liable for a cash draw shortage or this deduction constituted someform of actionable discrimination (i.e. one based on gender, religion, race, etc). You employers action was most probably legal. To be sure, consult directly with an employment law attorney in your area.


text:
Sen-lun Yu
Sen-lun Yu is a researcher for Screen in Greater China (Hong Kong and Taiwan incl.).
Contact Info
- Tel: (86) 139 1151 9673
- E-mail: email@example.com
Recent stories
New Chinese talent
Shanghai is the place to discover commercial independent Chinese cinema
China in their hands
Shanghai cinema-goers are trail-blazers when it comes to supporting indie cinema in China, and are helping the Shanghai International Film Festival (June 11-19) to increase its global significance. Sen-lun Yu reports
China's international steps
Chinese investors are also beginning to explore overseas opportunities. By Sen-lun Yu
- The powerhouse
- Screen grab
- SFG to launch joint venture with Technicolor
- MacDowell, Lau and Im join Shanghai juries
- China shows its strength
- Shanghai Film Festival announces project market line-up
- Strategic Film Partners picks up Lau's Kung Fu Cyborg


text:
Pakistan PM Dismissed Because Of Corruption Probe Against Supreme Court Judge?s Son: Ruling PartyArsalan was acused of having received 342 million Pakistani rupees ($3.6 million) from real estate magnate Malik Riaz Hussain in order to influence cases in the court.
Pakistan Chaos: Prominent PM Nominee ArrestedShahabuddin is a prominent member the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP), who most recently served as textiles minister under Gilani
The Increasing Threats to Global Energy Supplies - An Interview with JellyfishMichael Bagley is the president of Jellyfish, a global boutique intelligence firm that combines on-the-ground intelligence collection and analytics with an unprecedented country-to-country economic diplomacy program that helps governments, corporations, institutions and private individuals forge secure partnerships, discover new opportunities and mitigate operational risks.
Time Is Up: Millions Of Afghan Refugees In Iran, Pakistan Fear Return To Battled-Scarred CountryAfghans have been fleeing their homeland in massive numbers since 1979 when Russian tanks invaded their mountainous nation
Pakistan Scrambling To Find New Prime Minister In Yet Another Political CrisisPresident Asif Ali Zardari, who is intimately involved in the intrigue surrounding Gilani?s removal from office, has cancelled a trip to Russia in order to deal with the emergency.
'Al Qaeda' Gunman Holds Four Hostage in French City of ToulouseFrance's BFM-TV said the man had asked to speak to the same elite police unit that shot Islamist gunman Mohamed Merah, who died in a hail of bullets just 100 yards from the scene of today's siege.
Pakistan Taliban Chief Bans Polio VaccinePakistan is one of three countries in the world where polio is still endemic.
Ghazala Javed: Victim Of Taliban?s War On Women?Fearing the Taliban?s edicts against music, she recorded many of her albums in Dubai.
Pakistan?s Top Court Disqualifies Prime Minister Gilani From Holding OfficePPP is engaged in an emergency session, probably to choose a successor for Gilani, who has run out of legal options to stay in power.
Did You Hear The One About The Fat Pakistani Cop?The cops in Punjab will have to get their waistlines to 38 inches or less in two weeks.
Sen Lieberman: White House Leaks 'Worst In A Long Time'There's concern among some U.S. lawmakers that recent national security leaks that allegedly originated in the White House may have, among other consequences, jeopardized the security of Americans conducting the operations.
Taliban Praise India For Resisting US Call For More Active Role In AfghanistanNotwithstanding India's strong opposition to the Taliban, the religious extremist group Sunday praised New Delhi for resisting the U.S. call for greater involvement in Afghanistan.
Enoch Powell's Centennial: A Complex, Frustrating And Fascinating ManThe very peak of Powell's career likely occurred in April 1968,when he delivered his infamous Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham in which he warned that unchecked immigration of non-whites into Britain would lead to violence in the streets and social collapse.
Third India-US Strategic Dialogue To Discuss Key Regional, Global IssuesThe United States and India Wednesday agreed to further strengthen bilateral relations and cooperation on global issues and said that their ties had entered a new and more mature phase defined by constant consultations of strategic importance.
Iran Looks to China and Russia for Military Support as Pressure from the West IncreasesBeset by rising rhetoric about a possible Israeli attack against its nuclear facilities, Iran is seeking full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an additional layer of international diplomatic life insurance. On 12 November 2011 Iranian Supreme National Security Council's Secretary Assistant Ali Bageri said that Iran is seeking full membership in the SCO, upgrading its current observer status, telling journalists in Moscow, We have already submitted a relevant...
India and the United States: A Focus on the FundamentalsThis week, leaders from India and the United States will gather in Washington to discuss our expanding cooperation on everything from trade to technology to terrorism. There also will be issues on which we don't see eye to eye, and some of those may dominate the media coverage.
Closed NATO Supply Routes Costing US Extra $100M Every MonthFollowing the accidental killing of 24 Pakistani troops by U.S. missiles last November, Islamabad has closed the transport routes.
A New Day in Myanmar? Not For The Stateless, Rejected Rohingya PeopleSectarian violence has flared in western Myanmar (formerly Burma) between Muslims and Buddhists, following the brutal rape and murder of a young woman last month.
Britain Caught Between US-Pakistan RiftThe British minister held discussions with both Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar and added that he urged a quick reconciliation.
Drone Crash In Maryland: Navy Still Seeking Cause Of $46M Plane?s Plummet Near SalisburyA drone aircraft crashed around noon Monday on Maryland's Eastern shore near Salisbury, but did not cause any injuries or property damage, Naval officials said.


text:
« Local Home
Ratings and Reviews
The Petropolitan [view the full listing]
Top Notch Service
I had Bailey for only 3 weeks and needed to go out of town for business. I was stressed out about my meeting and leaving my new puppy but Petropolitian was a life saver! Love the pick up and drop off service! I had to stay an extra day becuase my return flight was canceled, one call later and everything was handled. Very impressed with how accomodating they are...very afforable too! Highy recommend Petropolitian!
Personalized services!
The Petropolitan is a great business because it offers many specialized services. They have a lot of different grooming and petsitting/daycare options available. They'll even pick you up at your house and take you for a walk or to the dog park! They carry tasty treats and unique toys. They will special order stuff for you or be your personal shopper! It's everything you need for the totally pampered pup!
1 pet found this review helpful


text:
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies are soft, fluffy, and full of chocolate and peanut butter!
Welcome to the day 3 of Cookie Week, hosted by Kim of Cravings of a Lunatic and Susan of The Girl In the Little Red Kitchen! We've teamed together with 10 other talented bloggers to bring you 5 fantastic days of cookie recipes to get you in to the holiday spirits. If you love to pin make sure to check out our #CookieWeek Pinterest board full of all the cookie recipes you'll see here this week!
Our sponsors for this event have provided us with some great prizes and we'd like to extend a huge thank you for their generosity. Thanks to Imperial Sugar, Circulon, Peanut Butter & Co. and Page Street Publishing for being a part of Cookie Week!
I hope that you are enjoying Cookie Week so far. Yesterday was Homemade Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Oreo's. Be sure to check them out if you missed them. Also, make sure that you enter the giveaway at the bottom of the post for some great prizes! Tomorrow I am sharing an over the top skillet cookie that you are going to want to add to your baking list immediately. Along with these these peanut butter chocolate chips cookies. These cookies are perfectly thick, chewy, fluffy, and definitely worthy of a tall glass of milk!
Have you seen those new Nestle chocolate chips that are filled? I think they have caramel, peanut butter, mint, and maybe raspberry. I picked up a package of the peanut butter ones to make these cookies. If you do not have them, feel free to just use regular chocolate chips. Either way they will be delicious. This recipe is based on these Reese's Peanut Butter Cookies that have proven to be very popular around here. I love my cookies to be soft and chewy, and these peanut butter cookies are exactly that. They freeze really well too if you want to make them ahead of time. You can even freeze some of the dough, so you can bake fresh hot peanut butter chocolate chip cookies each night of the week!
- 3/4 cup butter , softened
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 21/2 cups flour
- 1 cup chocolate chips
- 1 cup Nestle peanut butter filled chocolate chips
reheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream together butter, sugar, brown sugar, and peanut butter. Once well combined add eggs and vanilla. Slowly add in flour, salt, and baking soda. Fold in chocolate chips. Scoop round balls onto cookie sheet. Slightly flatten the cookie.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Remove and allow to cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes.
Move cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.
How to enter:
- Mandatory Entry: Leave a comment telling us know what your favorite cookie is to bake during the holidays.
- Many more additional ways to enter in the rafflecopter widget.
1 (one) lucky person will win a the prizes listed above, who will be randomly chosen through Rafflecopter. This giveaway is open from Monday, November 3rd, 2014 to Monday, November 11th 11:59 EST to US residents only. 1 winner will be contacted by me via email and will have 48 hours to respond, at which time a new winner will be drawn. Good luck!
Let's see what's baking up in the oven today:
- Maple Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies by The Girl In The Little Red Kitchen
- S'mores Cookies by Cravings of a Lunatic
- Banana Walnut Biscotti by Chocolate Moosey
- Brown Butter Pecan Toffee Cookies by The Cooking Actress
- Candy Topped Toffee Squares by That Skinny Chick Can Bake
- Maple Walnut Shortbread Cookies by Hungry Couple
- Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dinners, Dishes and Desserts
- Savory Cheddar Coins by Crumb
- White Chocolate Cranberry Ginger Cookies by Jen's Favorite Cookies


text:
|Start Date + Time: 5/6/17 at 9:00 AM
|End Date + Time: 5/6/17 at 10:30 AM
|Location: Microsoft - Mall of America
|Bloomington, MN
|Grade Range: 4-5
|Fee: $11
|Registration Closes: 4/20/2017 at 11PM CST
|Register online here.
Or print and register by mail.
|If you are not a current Girl Scout member,
please register by phone at 800-845-0787.
Join the experts at the Microsoft store in the Mall of America as you learn the ins and outs of technology in entertainment. Discover the sound waves in a ring tone, the light magic that makes movies, and the topsy-turvy physics of rollercoasters. Girls will be able to enjoy one free roller coaster ride at Nickelodeon Universe in the mall during the event. Girl Scout Juniors will earn their Entertainment Technology Badge at this event. Adult chaperones are required to attend the event with the girls.
If you have questions or would like to register by phone, please call 800-845-0787.
Please review our Event and Cancellation Policies.


text:
While I was taking a look at Gampo Abbey's website, I came across a page for a fantastic event: Every year they buy lobsters and then set them free in the ocean.
That's compassion in action.
Om Mani Peme Hung
Lobster release in Nova Scotia
Discuss the application of the Dharma to situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering and injustice.
2 posts • Page 1 of 1
Re: Lobster release in Nova Scotia
A cautionary note. Last year a dozen or so lobsters were released into Burrard Inlet. Which would be fine except they were Atlantic lobsters and this is the Pacific. Fortunately they did not establish a breeding population and displace the local species.
So make sure what you release is not an alien species!
So make sure what you release is not an alien species!
Sergeant Schultz knew everything there was to know.
2 posts • Page 1 of 1
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests


text:
Hey guys,
As some of you will remember, we used to have a great feature on the old AudioJungle blog where we would publish interviews with AudioJungle authors. Well, this feature is coming back!
Author Interviews
If you would like to be interviewed (questions will be sent to you by e-mail) and have your interview published on our blog, then please leave a comment in this thread and I will contact you with the questions.
Having your interview published on our blog is just one way to receive some fantastic exposure for your audio portfolio, not just to other authors, but many customers too. We will of course link to your portfolio. Another incentive is that we will also be offering, for the very first time, a special badge for anyone who is interviewed!
Brand New Blog
I can also reveal that our blog on tumblr is going to be totally revamped and revolutionized! Instead of a separate AudioJungle blog, I can reveal that all marketplaces are going to be combining their efforts to produce one blog largely focusing on authors. So where interviews are concerned, your interview and portfolio exposure is going to be drastically increased because authors and customers from ALL marketplaces will be reading it, not just the AudioJungle audience!
So I cannot emphasize how great of an opportunity this is for you.
Please leave your name in this thread if you would like to be interviewed, even if you have been interviewed previously.
We'll reveal even more exciting news about the blog soon, stay tuned!
Hey Scott!
We're still interested!
Kind regards,
Great News!
Yes, I'm definitely interested.
Thanks and Have a great weekend!
Sure I'm curious! Count me in!
Ha, ha, that's what I love about you guys, how quick + passionate you are about your music and AudioJungle. Thanks, guys! Keep the requests/names coming, I'll be in touch with you all very soon!
hey scott, if the offer is still available, count me in, I'll do anything for some extra exposure
Me too, me too
Count me in!
Hey! seems like a great opportunity. Count me in 100%
Yes, a great option! I'm very interested in that as well!


text: The lawyer for an Oxford teenager facing manslaughter charges for allegedly causing a car crash in West Paris that killed two friends has filed a motion to suppress statements made to police. A lawyer for 19-year-old Kristina Lowe argues that when his client talked to a state trooper in the hospital the day after the crash, she was on strong painkillers and was not read her rights. Police allege Lowe admitted to texting while driving at the time of the January 7 crash. Police say Lowe had also been drinking, smoking marijuana and was driving 75 miles per hour. Lowe pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer blamed icy roads. The Sun Journal, reports that the prosecution and defense have until next week to submit information to the judge before he rules.


text:
Basecoat Did Not Adhere
View Single Post
Brian Martin,Freelance adviser
Streetbeasts lawsuit donor
Last photo:
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: San francisco bay area
Age: 58
Posts: 15,487
Edits: 0
Thanks: 4,313
Thanked 3,723 Times in 2,758 Posts
MARTINSR's Photo Album
Originally Posted by
As swvalcon said, Barry recommends adding activator to the base and intercoat. I have done this before without issue, so I do not think that is it.
The primer I used is "regular 2k" from SPI. That is what it is named. Yes, it is urethane primer.
I did not wet sand. I always dry sand primer. The primer was shot and sanded the day before. It was approx 12 hours inbetween applying the primer and the base. The last coats of primer were block sanded first with 320 and then 600. I was wondering myself if I missed a spot sanding when I first seen it flake off, but I didn't miss the entire door.
After sanding, I clean with waterborne wax and grease remover and a white, lint free cloth until no more dirt shows up. The towel comes out clean. I give the waterborne about 30 minutes to dry with the booth fans on.
I didn't measure metal temp sadly enough, but I did monitor air temp. If anything, the metal was too cold not too hot.
The hood doesn't have any issues that I am aware of, just the doors currently (I have not tried to peel the paint on the rest of the truck, the doors started peeling on their own while color sanding). I added a picture of the hood basically to show what it looked like before sanding and doesn't have any real relevance to the discussion.
It is quite possible that I sanded the doors first. I don't remember, but it is likely. I waited about 1 hour after applying the primer to sand (SPI says 20 minutes). I wouldn't think that SPI primer has this "healing" property if it says to sand in 20 with no recoat window. Anyone know for sure?
I don't know of anything I did different between panels or for any other vehicle I have done. I thought that the bit of grey and sand scratches on the peeled paint might be a clue to someone in the field as to what went wrong. I am fishing for ideas on the cause so I don't make the same mistake twice.
Barry may recommend it, but does the manufacturer of the paint? THAT is who I would listen too about a product. He may very well be right, I am not saying he is wrong, but the manufacturer of the product is who you need to go to for something like that. It's like this peeling problem, now go to Barry, he may have some answers for you.
I am suspecting that the waterborne wax and grease remover may be at play here. It can be VERY slow evaporating, if you used it as liberally as it sounds you did that may be the crux of the problem here in that one of two things. The waterborne could have help to "kick" it healing it OR it soaked up the water and that came up between the base and primer eliminating the adhesion of the base.
With so little adhesion that the paint came off during color sanding!
That is some SERIOUS loss of adhesion, one I have never seen before in my 35 years of doing this stuff.
I am thinking the primer had soaked up some water, it shouldn't as it's a quality 2k but that is what it looks like to me. Maybe the mixing ratio wasn't right on?
View Public Profile
Find all posts by MARTINSR


text:
Your Cat, Your Life
The Scoop
Cat News, Politics
Meow-Out-Loud Humor
Cat Chic
Gear and Glam
Your cat loves a clean toilet -- don't we all? Catster's singing Cat Lady, Sarah Donner, explains why.
Cat Breeds
Foods & Treats
Health & Care
Behavior & Training
Cats & Cleaning
Cat of the Day
Photo Comments (6)
Photo Comments (3)
Photo Comments (1)
Photo Comments (2)
Photo Comments
COTD??? Me? Holy honor! But how? The pink monkey has been so neglectful lately because of that thing called "werk". She works, comes home, more work, feeds us, more work, sometimes falls asleep while working, eventually climbs into bed. We have had ZERO playtime, except for what we do while she's sleeping *muffled giggles* to her fingers and toes. Not our fault they move in her sleep MOL! You'd think by now she'd figure out who was having midnight nibbles on her fingers and toes, but every time one of us attacks those moving targets, she wakes up and says WTH!
We have a looooooong list of thankies for both COTD and mine and Sausage's Gotcha Day back in Feb! That's how neglectful the pink monkey has been! There is no eggscuse for it.
So here goes..... I am including the Catster/Dogster ID and/or Furmily ID, and will add as we go through our Catster notifications.
Sammie 755976
Athena 358568
Wanda, Norman & family 552444
Spot Kat (R.I.P), Pepper & family 152781
Mac, Ivy & family 762342
Friday 493080
Muffy 224103
KiwiKatt 1315978
Platelicker 1020090
Casey 841357
Mugsy & family 94566
Hooch 707783
Smiley Cassanova 1178389
Mac 1155034
Snowy & family 459228
Rosie 1206203
Harley & family 1197721
Ruby & family 220330
Angel Bootz & family 1145676
Penny 1197510
Morticia 602981
Manytoes 288075
Luigi & Smiley 1029290 (BESTEST ACCENTS MOL)
Frankie & family 1016155
Paisan 439444
Gabby 1282299
Athena 358568
Muppetini & family 624959
Pete 1043247
Kally Kat 816792
Autumn 175081
Rebby 176179
Carolina Crew 838926
Tigger and the gang 177304
Taz & family 110527
Walker & family 706488
Buddy Angel & family 324893
Callie Rose & family 324705
Greystone & family 200281
D-Max & family 131078
Kibbles, Francis & family 508521
Harley, Raj & family 1036793
Zoey, Opie & family 198814
Angel Buddy Always Loved 62740
Guido 800713
Angel Buddie Always Loved told me so!!! My Pink Monkey's laptop eggsploded, so we haven't even been able to thank evfurry fur propurrly for my DOTD!!! Working on the iPad is like trying to communicate via smoke signals. But the laptop is getting reimaged tomorrow, so we'll be up and running propurrly afterwards!! And able to update all of our diaries, thanking evfurry fur the way we want to! Thankies Catster and evfurry fur!!!!!!!
Much Loves, hugs and purrs to evfurry fur from,
Sausage, Meatball, Pierogie & Puma
Thank you so furry much Catster and furriends, and to all who have sent pressies and conCATulations and more!! I will be back later to update this entry in detail, but want to get my thankies out there!!!
Copyright © I-5 Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.
Visit Dogster


text:
Holdfast Bay
|Holdfast Bay
Looking north along the beach at Holdfast Bay to Glenelg
|Gulf St Vincent, South Australia
|34°58′16″S 138°30′29″E / 34.97111°S 138.50806°ECoordinates: 34°58′16″S 138°30′29″E / 34.97111°S 138.50806°E[1]
|Primary outflows
|Gulf St Vincent
|Basin countries
The Holdfast Bay is a small bay in Gulf St Vincent, next to Adelaide, South Australia. Along its shores lie the City of Holdfast Bay and the popular beach-side suburb of Glenelg.
European settlement on Holdfast Bay[edit]
The bay was named by Colonel William Light, South Australian surveyor general, in mid-1836. In his journal he expressed his pleasure at the quality of the anchorage after riding out a storm.[2] Holdfast Bay was the site of the landings in 1836 and 1837 by pioneers who were to set up the colony of South Australia. On 8 November 1836 Robert Gouger, Colonial Secretary and Chief Magistrate, arrived there aboard the Africaine and set up camp near The Old Gum Tree. With the arrival of Governor Hindmarsh on 28 December and the proclamation of the new colony, the Holdfast Bay settlement became the first seat of government of South Australia. (It remained the seat of government until mid-March 1837.) On 31 December 1836 the Holdfast Bay settlement was renamed Glenelg.
- ^ "Holdfast Bay (SA)". Gazetteer of Australia online. Geoscience Australia, Australian Government.
- ^ Elder, David (1984). William Light's Brief Journal and Australian Diaries. Adelaide: Wakefield Press. p. 29. ISBN 0-949268-01-1.
External links[edit]
|This article about a place in Adelaide is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.


text:
End of Life
Research Efforts
As the lead NIH Institute for end-of-life research, the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) supports science to assist individuals, families, and health care professionals in managing the symptoms of advanced illness and planning for end-of-life decisions.
Research in Palliative and End-of-Life Care
NINR also recognizes that high-quality, evidence-based palliative care is a critical component of maintaining quality of life at any stage of illness, including the end of life.
To advance palliative and end-of-life care, NINR supports research to
- relieve symptoms and suffering
- better understand how care needs differ according to setting, culture, and location.
NINR-supported research has found that end-of-life care varies largely in different settings, especially in the provision of hospice care and withdrawal of life support. End-of-life care is beginning to be provided in nursing homes, intensive care units, and in hospice settings, yet standards and quality of care vary across these settings.
Health Disparities and End-of-Life Care
NINR-supported researchers are also examining health disparities at the end of life, especially the impact of culture, ethnicity and geographic location on end-of-life care. Their studies have found that families who speak limited English receive less information and support in the intensive care unit during conferences between clinicians and family members. They have also found geographic differences in the accessibility of hospice care, with rural areas often having limited access.
Nursing Home Care at End-of-Life
While the number of seniors dying in nursing homes is steadily increasing, few studies have examined the quality of end-of-life care in these facilities, or determined if there are differences between rural and urban areas in terms of quality of end-of-life care. A recent research finding indicates that quality may differ, with nursing home residents more likely to have in-hospital death and less hospice use. Understanding the role of hospice-use practices in the quality-of-care problems in nursing homes is essential to overcoming geographic and quality challenges.
Depression and End-of-Life
In another NINR-funded study, systematic assessment for depression was added to the usual care provided in hospice; the patient's caregivers were also assessed. The researchers found that when this assessment was reported to the interdisciplinary team that cared for the patients and their caregivers, patient depression rates were lower, and quality of life improved without any additional assessment or intervention.
Decision Making at the End-of-Life
Decision making at the end of life, including withdrawal of life support, is a very stressful time for families and decision makers for the terminally ill. One NINR-supported project found that family satisfaction with the decision-making process was associated with how the ICU clinician recommended withdrawing life support, if he or she discussed the patient's wishes and the family's spiritual needs, and if the family felt supported during the decision-making process.
Research in end-of-life care continues to be an important part of NINR's scientific agenda. The significance of this research area is highlighted in the NINR strategic plan. As such, "The Science of Compassion: Enhancing End-of-Life and Palliative Care" is recognized as one of four key themes that will guide the future growth of NINR-supported science.
Directions for Future Research
Further research is needed to
- develop and test strategies to minimize the physical and psychological burdens on, and better maintain the health of, caregivers, particularly when the person for whom they are caring nears the end of life
- determine the impact of providers trained in palliative and end-of-life care on health care outcomes
- create new communication strategies among clinicians, patients, families, and communities to promote decision making regarding complex treatment and care options in the face of life-threatening illness.
To learn more, see NINR's Spotlight on End-of-Life Research and Building Momentum: The Science of End of Life and Palliative Care -- A Review of Research Trends and Funding, 1997-2010.


text:
The Outsider: James Fallows
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – March 31, 1997
The Outsider
James Fallows is a thinker and a writer who is not beloved of the
Washington media establishment. Is he just what U.S. News & World
Report needs?
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS after Dr. Ian Wilmut, of Scotland's Roslin Institute,
announced his breakthrough, the only questions at Time and Newsweek were
whether to use images of sheep (Time) or people (Newsweek) on the cover
and just how large a proportion of each magazine the cloning story would
consume. "It is a classic news-magazine story in the very best sense," Rick
Smith, Newsweek's president and editor-in-chief, told me a few days
later. "There aren't that many mandatory covers a year. It
seems to me this is definitely in that category.
Meanwhile, down in Washington, James Fallows, who has
been the editor of U.S. News & World Report since September, was phoning
Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the magazine, in New York. The scheduled cover
story was U.S. News's annual "America's Best Graduate
Schools" rankings, but Zuckerman wanted to go with a cloning cover.
"Hi, Mort," said Fallows, standing
as he spoke into the phone, giving the bad news. "It looks as if
it's logistically impossible to shift the grad-school package to
the following week." That was because a tie-in paperback book,
with a more elaborate version of the magazine's graduate-school
rankings, had already been shipped. "It would look odd to have
the book go on sale ten days before the magazine."
When Fallows hung up, I asked him if he was upset
that logistics prevented him from putting clones on the cover. He smiled
and said, "You mean, given that it's the most important story
of the last two or three decades? Yes." Fallows's central
exhortation to journalists, delivered in his influential 1996 book "Breaking
the News" and, staff members say, on the job week after week, is "Make
the important interesting." Cloning is plainly both. All the same,
here was the aggressively high-minded new editor of a self-consciously
serious magazine meekly deferring to a modest commercial exigency. "But
with the imperfect justice of the weekly-magazine business," he
insisted, "the treatment in terms of the story will be identical
to what it would be if we had it on the cover."
A little later, his managing editor, Harrison
(Lee) Rainie, came in to tell him that the reporting staff was not enthusiastic
about what it might be able to produce. It was Tuesday morning, and U.S.
News doesn't print until late Friday night. Still, Rainie said
to his boss, "We're going to scale back our ambitions on
"Fine," Fallows told him.
The next day, Zuckerman remained hopeful about
keeping the cover on the news. "We may have two covers—grad
schools on the newsstand and cloning for subscribers," he said.
It was not to be: while Time gave cloning six separate articles in fourteen
pages, and Newsweek three articles in nine pages, Fallows stuck with
his twenty-nine-page "Best Graduate Schools" package and
devoted only five pages to clones. (As it turned out, the magazine had
miscalculated its rankings of law schools, and the paperback books—the
main argument for staying with the graduate-schools cover—were
recalled.) The reason he finally skimped on cloning, Fallows explained
after the issue closed, was that "we didn't think there was
an enormous amount more to say than what was going to be said in the
AND that is the problem of modern news magazines.
What can they bring to their readers that newspapers and TV haven't
delivered days before? "The time when I seriously read news magazines
was when I first lived in Texas, in the late seventies," Fallows,
who is forty-seven, recalls. "That was a different technological
era, when you couldn't get a good daily paper there." Outside
the big cities, news magazines "were indispensable as a source
of news."
Fallows had touched the trailing end of that indispensability.
It's hard to overstate the extent to which Time was the national
news medium during the forties and fifties. Newsweek and U.S. News (both
of which were founded in 1933, a decade after Time) were then decidedly
third-rate. What Time provided, even more than information, was reality—or,
at least, a snappy Ivy League Republican depiction of it. To appear on
the cover of Time was to receive mass culture's unequivocal certification
of importance, and the annual Man of the Year designation seemed less
a gimmick than a kind of official occasion, the American equivalent of
the Queen's New Year's honors list. As a quasi monopoly,
Time could define newsworthiness at will, simply because it was what
it pointedly called itself: "The Weekly News Magazine." Covers
were given to novelists, composers, architects, college presidents, religious
figures, African prime ministers, obscure Midwestern businessmen.
In 1961, after Philip Graham bought Newsweek for
the Washington Post Company, installed Osborn Elliott as its editor,
and promoted Ben Bradlee to be its Washington bureau chief, the magazine
turned into the serious competitor Time hadn't had. And the period
from Camelot to Nixon's resignation was a golden age for news magazines. "I
remember we'd go crazy with joy if we had a little paragraph of
something that nobody else had," Bradlee told me. John F. Kennedy
was the perfect news-magazine President, and Camelot was the perfect
news-magazine story, its plots and subplots and epiphenomena filling
practically every section, from National Affairs to Modern Living to
People. The assassinations, the civil-rights movement, the ghetto riots,
the struggle with faith ("IS GOD DEAD?"), the updraft of
the counterculture and Vietnam—it all made for a vivid epic that
Time and Newsweek handsomely, lucratively serialized.
Then the rest of the media caught up. Thirty years
ago, the weeklies could uniquely promise intelligence, clarity, and depth
to a national audience—but then came "The MacNeil/Lehrer
NewsHour," on PBS, and "Nightline," on ABC, and CNN,
MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel, and the Internet. Thirty years ago,
the Wall Street Journal was not a first-rate general-interest paper,
and the Times did not have a national edition. Nor had the big dailies
yet remade themselves into daily news magazines, with sections devoted
to style, celebrities, the arts, science, and so on. Today, even small
provincial dailies are highly art-directed and filled with stories off
the Times and Los Angeles Times/Washington Post wire services.
If the news magazines, conscious of their eroding
significance, have developed something of an inferiority complex during
the last couple of decades, U.S. News, the smallest and uncoolest of
the three, suffers from a double case. To civilians, the differences
between news magazines can be subtle, and in major respects the readerships
of Time (4.1 million circulation), Newsweek (3.2 million), and U.S. News
(2.3 million) are almost indistinguishable. The median reader of each
magazine is a man in his forties with a household income of about fifty
thousand dollars a year. On closer inspection, however, the demographic
profile of U.S. News readers remains distinct. The magazine was founded
in Washington by David Lawrence, a pro-business, anti-Roosevelt journalist,
and some of that spirit still informs U.S. News today. The stereotype
of the U.S. News reader is a retired lieutenant colonel living in Phoenix,
and there may be a grain of truth to it. Zuckerman says his readers are "much
more conservative" than those of Time and Newsweek. His publisher
and president, Thomas Evans, maintains, "They're more in
an information-processing mind-set. They tend to be more business-oriented." The
readerships of the two other magazines, Evans says, "tend to skew
more coastal," by which he means that his readers are slightly
more likely to be from Southern or mountain states. U.S. News devotes
its back-of-the-book to News You Can Use—service articles on subjects
like health-insurance deductibles and high-tech cameras. The almost generic
name of the magazine—U.S. News & World Report—has been
apt. It has been "Dragnet" to its rivals' "Law & Order" or "NYPD
Blue." Walter Isaacson, Fallows's counterpart at Time, says, "Mort
bought publications that happened to become available"—The
Atlantic, which Zuckerman bought in 1980, and the New York Daily News,
in 1992, as well as U.S. News, in 1984—"and not necessarily
the ones he most wanted."
Some of U.S. News's difficulties are endemic
to the genre. As recently as 1988, the combined circulation of the three
American newsweeklies was about 10.3 million; today, it has drifted down
to around 9.6 million. Most of that loss is attributable to Time, whose
newsstand sales have declined by a third since 1987; Newsweek's
have fallen by twelve per cent over the past four years. Time has cut
its corps of writers and correspondents from about a hundred and fifty
to a hundred. Newsweek has reduced its staff, too. Both magazines have
cut back sharply on researchers; indeed, an increasing number of Newsweek
stories no longer go through a separate fact-checking process. In the
early nineties, profit margins at all three newsweeklies were meagre.
Business was bad enough that executives of U.S. News and the Washington
Post Company, which owns Newsweek, began discussing a possible merger
of the two magazines' circulation and ad-sales staffs, along the
lines of certain cities' daily newspapers' joint operating
agreements. (The talks went nowhere.) In the past few years, profits
have rebounded at Newsweek (to $22.8 million last year) and even more
strongly at Time (to almost twice that). But here, too, U.S. News has
lagged behind. The magazine has had two straight years of advertising
declines, and makes only a small profit. To increase earnings, U.S. News
needs to increase its ad sales, which means acquiring an aura of heat
among the people at advertising agencies. That's where Fallows
comes in.
The business slough aside, everyone at U.S. News seems
to agree that the magazine was in need of editorial reinvigoration. U.S.
News has been the least writerly and energetic of the newsweeklies, and
in the past several years it seemed once again to be earning its old nickname:
Snooze. One U.S. News writer, a friend of Mike Ruby and Mimi McLoughlin,
the husband-and-wife co-editors whom Fallows succeeded, says, "They
were just plugging holes. When a first-rate person left, they would just
promote the second guy behind him, so no new blood was coming in. A lot
of the writers just went to sleep."
When Fallows arrived, in September, he quickly replaced
nine writers and editors. "Jim came in and said lifetime employment
is not necessarily going to be the norm in the future," James Impoco,
the business and technology editor, says. "Knowing Fallows the way
I do, I thought that would be the biggest challenge for him. I didn't
think he would do it, because he's a very nice guy—though that
would be disputed wildly now."
U.S. News shares a bland, postmodern building with the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a quiet, nondescript section
of a city that does not regard nondescript as a pejorative. Jim Fallows's
third-floor office has two computer workstations (one is for reading copy,
the other for everything else), but the personal touches—a messy
stack of jazz CDs, a plate of plastic spaghetti with a spaghetti-entwined
fork hovering above it—are bohemian by Washington-office standards.
It is the first real office outside his home that Fallows has had since
1978, when he quit as Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. Probably
his most significant job before that was as a writer and editor at the
neoliberal Washington Monthly. A Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate, he
arrived in 1972 and helped usher in that tiny magazine's decade of
magnificently disproportionate influence. Although he has been on the masthead
of The Atlantic Monthly for seventeen years, Fallows has primarily been
an author, who grinds out big, serious books intended to frame and influence
major national debates.
"Breaking the News," like Fallows's
earlier books—on defense policy, on educational meritocracy in
America, and on the political economy of East Asia—is ambitious,
sober, and lucid. The book forcefully argues that the media spend too
much time and energy reporting the trivial and the merely contentious,
and that élite journalists tend to be out of touch with the concerns
of the little guy. He also loosely embraces the ideas of "public
journalism"—a movement emphasizing that journalists are also
citizens who bear some obligation in their work to help remedy community
and social problems.
His arrival at U.S. News as editor has naturally
meant that the magazine would be held to a grander, better standard than
that of the competition. Unfortunately for him, that's a high bar—or,
rather, the existing bar is not as low as he suggested in his book. Time
and Newsweek, for all their coverage of O.J. and Princess Di, are staffed
with thoughtful writers who are given space for substantive and worthy
stories—at least as many pages in a typical issue as U.S. News
can spare for such stuff. And Fallows is well aware that virtuous intentions
are not enough to improve the magazine, let alone increase its ad sales. "Something
that drove me crazy in the reaction to my book was the idea that this
public-journalism concept was so doctrinaire," he says. "That
it meant as soon as you went to any publication you would be saying, 'Now
we have the public-journalism orders here from the Pew Charitable Trusts,
and then we'll start having our uplifting stories.' When
I came here, my idea was not to have a sort of utopian model farm but
to put out a good magazine—a good version of this magazine."
As in the other American newsweeklies, there is
a front section of short articles, three or four to a page, and sections
devoted to domestic news, foreign news, business, and society-and-ideas
stories, with each article typically a page or two long. Then the major
genetic difference kicks in: Time and Newsweek run stories about movies
and show business and books and performers, and U.S. News pretty much
doesn't. Although the magazine has pitched its obliviousness of
culture as a strategic choice, Fallows seems to feel a bit hemmed in
by it. "U.S. News is probably eight or ten pages shorter than Time
or Newsweek," he says. "Part of that is deliberate and self-inflicted,
in having this ten-year-old franchise of News You Can Use. There's
room in Time and Newsweek for regular reviews of movies, music, the theatre,
and art. That brings a kind of built-in sizzle to the other magazines." The
News You Can Use section was recently expanded by half—at Zuckerman's
direction—and, of course, that has further reduced the space Fallows
can allot to more consequential journalism.
He has also inherited an editorial apparatus that
is skimpy even when compared with the downsized Time and Newsweek. U.S.
News, with its Friday-night deadline, prints at least twenty-four hours
earlier than the others. "That difference is the one which veteran
newshounds—I'm saying those words ironically—would
most lament," Fallows says. And the staff is small. U.S. News has
just twenty full-time domestic and foreign correspondents; Time has seventeen
reporters posted in Washington alone.
"He hasn't really spelled out in great
detail exactly where he wants to take the magazine," Impoco says. "He's
been doing damage control, trying to bring the quality of the magazine
up to a level where he can contemplate that." Because Fallows was
not a close reader of U.S. News before he took the job, he didn't
realize that the prose was often mediocre. "The quality of the
writing surprised him," one of his editors says.
"There are stronger and weaker contributors," Fallows
says diplomatically. "I spend a lot of my time at simple copy editing
and story doctoring. I think it's something I know how to do. It's
somewhere I'm seen as having a legitimate judgment."
Every Monday, he E-mails a memo to the staff filled
with assessments of the new issue—the usual back-patting and, often,
writing instruction. Some of the memos have been as long as fourteen
hundred words, but he says that lately "I try to confine them to
very brief lessons of the week—here's the lesson about overusing
metaphors, here's the lesson about clarity of a sentence." He
pauses to annotate himself: "I'm using 'lesson' in
ironic terms." But they are lessons. "In a news magazine
it's usually not appropriate for the author to play a large first-person
role in the story," one recent missive observed. "Metaphors
used with care can be tremendously effective in conveying meaning. .
. . We should try never to use familiar, empty images."
As Fallows is aware, his sense of news inspires
less confidence at the magazine than his sense of language. It has been
a quarter of a century since he graduated from Harvard, where he was
the editor of the Crimson; since then, he has almost exclusively taken
the long view, producing essays and reportage that aim for relevance
not days and weeks but months and years hence. Although the ubiquity
of headline services—on TV, on the Web, and now on cell phones
and pagers—has obviated some of the week-in-review mission of news
magazines, they do remain newsweeklies. A newsroom urgency is, for most
of the people who produce the magazines and many who read them, part
of the attraction. Fallows doesn't get off on that stop-the-presses
Brian Duffy, who used to run U.S. News's
investigative team and, after Fallows arrived, its national-news section,
recently left to work for the Washington Post. "My interests have
always been in covering the news as it happens," he says. "And
Jim had less of an urgent sense about that than I did." Duffy remembers
being incredulous last fall when Fallows didn't want to schedule
a big story on the firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian
security forces on the West Bank, which was "the biggest incident
since the start of the intifada," Duffy says. "Mort told
me he was very surprised, and thought we should have done more on it."
Nicholas Lemann is both Fallows's professional
doppelgänger (Harvard Crimson president, Washington Monthly writer,
Atlantic correspondent, author of important nonfiction books) and an
old friend. Fallows "doesn't have that much of a newshound
gene," he concedes. "I'm not going to say he has this
inner sense of what a news story is. That's not Jim. The question
is, does someone who doesn't have a conventional news sense still
have the ability to make a news magazine work?"
"Sure, there are learning curves that go
with anybody who hasn't done this," Zuckerman says. "That's
why it takes a little time for this transition to evolve. He has a sense
of news; it may not be quite as sensitive at this stage, but he's
going to have other people around who will work with him on that."
Fallows, for his part, maintains that he has a
perfectly fine news sense. His cover story a month ago on how drug cartels
have corrupted the Mexican government was impressively ahead of the curve.
And there is an old-fashioned news-magazine instinct that lets the Times
front page and the Associated Press wire dictate one's journalistic
agenda. The wire-service-hack attitude has hung heavy at U.S. News, and
Fallows isn't wrong to resist it. "My goal is to have serious-minded
coverage of the world that is not dull—and I stress the last part," he
says. "The thing I have been spending most of my time on here is
not the serious-minded part but trying to make it more interesting, trying
to have funnier headlines, trying to have funnier covers, trying to have
things that you would actually want to read." He illustrated a
cover story on jobs with a Roy Lichtenstein-like cartoon, a cover story
on Microsoft with Bill Gates as a martyred St. Sebastian, a cover story
on the Clinton Inauguration playing off the "Sgt. Pepper's" album
cover. When I asked him his favorite articles so far, the first three
he mentioned were a contrarian history of Christmas, an article on the
risks of plastic surgery illustrated with a cover photograph of a bare
female back, and, most recently, "The Business of Porn: An Inside
Look at the Sex Industry."
I asked him if such stories represent a deliberate
effort to disappoint those who expect a worthy, medicinal Jim Fallows
news magazine. "I'm sure at some buried level of my subconscious,
the idea may have occurred to me," he says. More to the point,
none of these stories would have been surprising in Time or Newsweek.
Although he says that his magazine's "long-run survival depends
on being different from Time and Newsweek," his commitment to such
distinctiveness seems somewhat theoretical. What he describes as his
charter—"a kind of news-based explanation," "a
sexy version of real news"—could be news-magazine boilerplate. "Maybe
this is a terrible thing to say, but I don't read Time and Newsweek
much more closely than I used to before becoming editor of U.S. News," he
told me. "I look through them without reading them seriously." Without
a vision of a distinct editorial alternative to Time and Newsweek, however,
a generally improving U.S. News will almost inevitably become more like
its competitors—smarter, more literate, and more interesting to
Jim Fallows-like readers than it has been previously, but with a possibly
diminished reason for being.
Is he worried about alienating archetypal U.S.
News readers with his funnier, sexier stories? "It's certainly
the case that you lose people faster than you get them," he said
of the audience reaction to his editorial changes. "But this magazine
cannot afford not to bring new readers in. A certain amount of trade-off
and churning is necessary." He concedes that the subscriber-renewal
rate has declined since his arrival, but says the decline is by only
a small margin and is entirely attributable to a five-dollar increase
in the subscription price which took effect last year. Unfortunately,
there's no evidence that new readers are clambering in via the
newsstand, which sometimes happens when a magazine makes itself livelier.
Evans, the publisher, says that newsstand sales are "flat to down" since
Fallows has been editor.
Of course, cosmopolites—the overclass, the
chattering classes, the urban élite, whatever—were never
great news-magazine readers. In the old days, being unfashionable never
much bothered the people who produced Time and Newsweek, probably because
the institutional power of the publications made up for the fact that
one's Manhattan friends didn't always read what one produced.
Today, that power has ebbed. (Surely one of the reasons Time is willing
to pay its excellent art critic Robert Hughes so extravagantly is that
his presence makes staff members feel good about working at Time.)
In the short term, the presence of a well-known,
and even controversial, new editor is probably good for business. Walter
Isaacson says, "U.S. News doesn't get much of a buzz, but
Fallows does." And buzz, of course, is good. "Every few years," Evans
says, "you want to be able to say, 'This is new and different.' Jim
has certainly gotten us a tremendous amount of visibility." That
kind of thinking seems incongruous with the down-to-earth, businesslike
self-conceptions of both Fallows and U.S. News, but then selling a magazine
to its highly distinct constituencies—old readers, new readers,
advertisers—is a complicated, paradoxical enterprise. If a few
hundred journalists in New York and Washington are talking excitedly
about a magazine's new editor, for whatever reason, soon a few
hundred ad-agency space buyers should be talking excitedly, too, and
then, if the magazine's salespeople get lucky, the ads increase.
Bob Mancini, the director of print buying for the J. Walter Thompson-U.S.A.
agency in Detroit, controls magazine advertising for Ford cars, and he
told me, "By bringing in Jim Fallows, who is one of the more brilliant
writers around, U.S. News & World Report is doing an excellent job
of contemporizing itself." By contemporizing, did he mean making
itself more like Time and Newsweek? "Definitely," he said.
"FALLOWS is not part of my crowd,"
Ben Bradlee, the lord of Georgetown, says. "But
people are talking about him a lot, there's no question about that.
He's in, and the spotlight's on him. My crowd talks about
him." That doesn't necessarily mean they have nice things
to say. In Washington, where Fallows and his family have lived for the
past six years, he is not an object of great affection. I asked him why
he thought that was.
"It's a good thing that I am not a
politician, or a consumer product," he replied. "Obviously,
my marketing has been faulty. My friends, I think, haven't found
me a figure devoid of humor, yet somehow the public view of me is of
Cotton Mather redux. But my main answer is, I don't know."
The main answer is "Breaking the News," with
its gauntlet toss of a subtitle—"How the Media Undermine
American Democracy." The book not only reproves the national media
culture for being nihilistic and bloody-minded but also accuses by name
some of its most prominent Washington members—Judy Woodruff, Brit
Hume, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Richard Cohen, and George Will among
them—of superficiality and venality. And when it comes to public
criticism no one is more thin-skinned than journalists.
Does anyone disagree with Fallows's point
that TV's ritualized ideological wrestling matches—"The
McLaughlin Group," "The Capital Gang," "Crossfire," and
so on—are unenlightening? Even the participants don't dispute
this, but they still loathe Fallows for making the case so emphatically.
And they squirmed at his assertion that the corollary practice of "buckraking," whereby
name-brand journalists collect fifteen- and thirty-thousand-dollar speaking
fees from trade associations and businesses, might pose conflicts of
"I read his book," Zuckerman says, "and
I knew all about it, yet it's one thing to write about it in the
abstract and another thing to manage a staff." Shortly after his
arrival, Fallows instituted at U.S. News a strict speaking-fee policy.
Zuckerman now says, "You can't have too arbitrary a ruling—how
absolute you make it is really difficult. Look, this is an important
part of the income of some of these people." Among these people
are the U.S. News political columnist and "Face the Nation" regular
Gloria Borger and the magazine's editor-at-large, David Gergen
(who received almost half a million dollars in fees in 1992, according
to "Breaking the News"). After months of to-and-fro, it was
determined that the speaking-fee policy will not apply to either of them,
because they are freelance contributors, not full-time U.S. News employees.
Both are friendly with Zuckerman.
So was Steven Roberts, another prominent U.S.
News writer, of whom Fallows had been especially critical in "Breaking
the News." Fallows fired him promptly, and Roberts became a kind
of Georgetown martyr. After Fallows pushed aside or drove out other,
less well-known staff members, the antagonism toward him acquired a pious
"All these people who are horrified at what
Fallows is supposed to be doing to U.S. News never read U.S. News and
never cared about U.S. News before," Nick Lemann says. Some of
the attacks do seem disingenuous, including a lot of the flak Fallows
gets because of his mild endorsement of public journalism. Advocates
of public journalism "do not have the complete or satisfying answer
to all of today's journalistic problems," Fallows wrote in
his book. "But . . . they are more right than wrong."
This is not exactly zealotry. Yet, according to
a commentary in the Times last year by Howell Raines, the editorial-page
editor and former Washington editor, Fallows is "a fount of dangerous
nonsense," and "journalists influenced by early political
employment are more apt to judge journalism by whether it makes life
easy for candidates and officeholders."
A year later, Fallows is still steaming over Raines's
broadside. "It surprised me in its obtuseness," he says. "I
would assume that the person running the editorial page of the New York
Times could distinguish between onetime experience in government twenty
years ago"—Fallows's two years in the Carter White
House—"and being a mouthpiece of the state, that such a person
could distinguish between criticism and nihilism, that these would not
be distinctions that escaped his mental grasp. It seems to me a willful
misreading. I can't believe that people are stupid enough to think
the only choice is Izvestia or withering sarcasm."
Raines and Fallows have a real disagreement about
the proper role of journalists—whether they should be prosecutorial
samurai or truthtelling wise men. But most of the Washington talk about
Fallows is, at its core, personal and visceral. As far as his peers are
concerned, it seems, Fallows is just not very clubbable. The role-of-journalism
debate that has swirled around Fallows, Bradlee figures, is "a
smoke screen." What really bugs people, he thinks, is "the
air he has of being superior."
Like Bradlee, Fallows is handsome and Harvard-educated
and frank. Unlike Bradlee, he strikes people as a goody-goody. He looks
like a son of George Bush, which in Washington isn't necessarily
bad, but he comes across to some like a John Anderson—a sanctimonious
neo-something. "Washington particularly hates moralists," Nick
Lemann says. "The Washington establishment really hates Ralph Nader"—for
whom Fallows once worked—"and it hated Jimmy Carter. It's
an intensely practical-minded city. It's a city that worships Sam
Fallows is bracingly, admirably forthright, but
in the manner of a progressive Episcopalian from an earlier age. "As
observant staff members will have noticed," one of his memos chirruped, "new
bodies (and accompanying souls!) keep filtering into the building." He
described his weekly memos to me, probably with some irony, as "long
epistles" and "shorter epistles." He is prone to speak
like an Edith Wharton character. "The main peril at the national
level," he said to me one morning in his office, "is one
that makes the top of my head threaten to detonate in irritation." Then
again, at other times he'll spout the language of a bureaucratic
task-force leader. "I'll work up an action plan," he
says during a story meeting with twenty staff members, and, later, "Let
me make an action point."
Show us a moralist and we can't wait to
find the hypocrisy—such is the pathological skepticism of American
journalists, Fallows argues. The worst thing they can get him on is the
fact that after leaving the Carter Administration he wrote an article
for The Atlantic called "The Passionless Presidency." Its
most memorable insider revelation—that Carter personally oversaw
the White House tennis-court schedule—became the paradigmatic fact
about Carter's Presidency. "The new scolding Fallows," Maureen
Dowd wrote in her Times column last year, "would probably find
the old scalding Fallows 'cynical.' " Fallows's
enemies, stretching the point, say that he was the seminal White House
tattletale—that Nancy Reagan's astrologer and Dick Morris
are his spawn. "That's sort of the Cokie Roberts–George
Will doctrine now," he says. "I know I was not the first
person who was providing inside data about an Administration." Yet
he does hold himself retroactively to his own rigorous standards, and
finds the Fallows of 1979 wanting. "In retrospect," he says,
the tennis-court story "did no good whatsoever." According
to Lemann, Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly,
had hoped to use Fallows as a "policy pipeline" to Carter. "It
looked like a very short step from chief speechwriter to chief adviser," Lemann
says. "It was very devastating to Charlie as it dawned on him that
Jim was expected to only write speeches." Did Fallows's personal
disappointment that he didn't assume the sort of role that Ted
Sorensen played for Kennedy or Bill Moyers played for Johnson fuel some
of his philosophical disappointment? "Yeah," Lemann says. "I
think so."
Fallows now finds himself both defending his high scruples
and disputing the charge that he is sanctimonious. I asked him what he
likes on television. "I religiously watch 'The Simpsons' and 'The
X-Files,' and not much else except sports," he replied. " 'The
Simpsons' I view as the greatest creative achievement of our time.
You could do worse than have 'The Simpsons' as the icon of
where this magazine should be." After a pause, he added, "It
is alarming to me that the two shows I watch are both on Fox, because Fox
also puts out all this shit."
U.S. News is the only one of Zuckerman's
publications where he has installed himself on the masthead as editor-in-chief.
That desire for hands-on stewardship is one reason for the rapid turnover
of his first three editors. Another reason may be that none of the three—Shelby
Coffey, David Gergen, and Roger Rosenblatt—had ever run a magazine
before. Neither has Fallows. And, like Rosenblatt, he is a distinguished,
donnish, left-of-center author. But the betting among people who know
Fallows and Zuckerman is that this owner-editor relationship will not
explode. "Jim has a lot of advantages over me, innate and experiential," says
Rosenblatt, who fought strenuously with Zuckerman before quitting, in
1989, and is now an essayist for Time and PBS. "Frankly, he has
the advantage of my having preceded him—I died that he may live.
I was a bull in an ammunition dump. If Mort felt strongly about not doing
something, I did it. It was foolishness on my part. I really was inept.
Also, Mort has learned a lot about running magazines. I can see it in
the product."
"Of all the things I feared when Jim took
over," one of his editors says, "it was a surprise that Jim
knows how to talk to Mort. Jim has handled Mort exceptionally well." Last
fall, in the course of approving and tweaking a redesign that had been
undertaken by his predecessors, Fallows decided to dump the opening "One
Week" essay. A few weeks later, Zuckerman called to say that he
missed "One Week." "One Week" returned. "Yes," Fallows
says now, smiling, "and I was wrong." As for the redesign
itself—an undramatic one—Fallows apparently accepted it grudgingly. "There
are parts I think are wonderful," he says, constitutionally unable
to lie outright.
Under the previous regime, Zuckerman would critique
each new issue with the top editors. With Fallows, critiques are more
ad hoc, and may come during any of eight or ten conversations they have
during a week. Fallows says his editor-in-chief seldom reads stories
before they are published, and asks for changes in maybe ten per cent
of those he does read. "Though, like everybody else, he's
fallible, he's also an extremely smart person, whose judgment most
of the time is sound," Fallows says. "Most of the suggestions
make the piece stronger, and the ones I think don't make the piece
stronger we talk over. Compared to a lot of owners I can think of, I
find him extraordinary. He wants his publications to make money, but,
even more, he wants them to be good." In the case of The Atlantic,
Zuckerman has spent about forty million dollars so far. "I'm
not a public company," Zuckerman says. "I don't need
to worry about quarterly earnings, or any earnings."
Zuckerman sounds patient. Fallows does not. "This
is the kind of job that can be done too long," he says. "I
like the other parts of my life." Fallows's intimates would
be surprised if he stayed more than five years. "I do not expect
him to do it for a long period of time," Zuckerman says. When I
mention the editorship of The Atlantic, which William Whitworth has held
for the seventeen years that Zuckerman has owned the magazine, he perked
up and mused, "I wonder if Fallows would like to do that at some
point in his life."
Fallows won't speculate. "I don't
want to encourage the philosophy of waiting me out," he says. He
seems determined to succeed, undeterred by the fact that he has been
cast against type, and that Beltway swells reject him. Indeed, like all
good moralists, Fallows seems to have a taste for being a pariah. "There
are certain people I would like to punch, but I spend zero of my time
thinking about a Washington society I'm either snubbing or not
snubbing," he told me. "To the extent I've thought
about it—well, I would think that it's not that bad a positioning
item for this magazine to have its editor reviled by the Washington establishment."
His peers in the magazine establishment don't
revile him, but they don't get him, either. Walter Isaacson says, "Not
doing Deng and not doing O.J."—as cover stories after the
Chinese leader died and after Simpson lost the civil case—"you
can argue, but Jim seems way off the news." Rick Smith, of Newsweek,
thinks that news-driven cover stories are essential to "remind
readers that there's a reason they get it every week, and not every
two weeks, or every month, or every quarter."
It is Fallows's desire, of course, to bewilder
the people who have produced news magazines their whole lives. U.S. News,
he declares, "will give its main play to the stories that it has
decided are important for its readers—not the stories that are 'out
there,' or 'have momentum.' " His outsiderism
and presumptively limited tenure could empower him to do more than simply
make U.S. News not bad, a Time without the arts coverage, a Newsweek
with more service pieces. If the big, well-funded rivals are the equivalents
of the Democratic and Republican Parties, nominally distinct but substantively
interchangeable, then the runty No. 3 might want to think of itself more
thoroughly and energetically as an alternative—as a can-do third
party with Fallows as its (saner, more trustworthy) Ross Perot. "According
to our internal research, the biggest thing about our readers is they're
independent-minded," Evans says. Many of the core readers—relatively
well-to-do, skeptical, Sun Belt guys—already seem to be Perotistas
by nature, and an anti-establishment, let-the-chips-fall candor ought
to work better for a magazine than it has for a political movement. Before "Breaking
the News," the grassroots hatred of the news media seemed mainly
a matter of talk-radio ranting, reactionary and dumb. Now it's
a respectable national conversation. U.S. News could work in an analogous
fashion, taking powerful left-field sentiments seriously. "I will
be perfectly comfortable, and I think Mort would be, too, if in a typical
week Time and Newsweek have the same subject on their covers and we have
something different," Fallows says. He doesn't even think
of them as his competition, he insists.
I asked Zuckerman if he thought Time and Newsweek
were the competition. "Sure," he said.
The two men disagree, but it seems to be a comfortable
disagreement. Zuckerman, who has known Fallows for two decades, understood
he was buying a contrarian, and Fallows confounded expectations even as
the job was being offered. "To be honest with you," Zuckerman
says, "I didn't think he'd take it." ©


text:
Process Optimisation of Beer Filtration using Fuzzy Control
Campbell, Duncan, Glastonbury, Robert, Lees, Michael, Pecar, Michael, & Rogers, Peter (2002) Process Optimisation of Beer Filtration using Fuzzy Control. In Leung, H (Ed.) Proceedings of the 6th IASTED International Conference, 17 - 19 July 2002, Banff, Canada.
Impact and interest:
Citation counts are sourced monthly from Scopus and Web of Science® citation databases.
These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.
Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.
|ID Code:
|Item Type:
|Conference Paper
|Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > ENGINEERING (090000) > ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING (090600) > Control Systems Robotics and Automation (090602)
|Past > QUT Faculties & Divisions > Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering
|Deposited On:
|17 Jun 2009 14:24
|Last Modified:
|10 Aug 2011 17:08
Export: EndNote | Dublin Core | BibTeX
Repository Staff Only: item control page