Pop Quiz.

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[New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg] said the decision to clamp down on media coverage was made to "protect the members of the press. We have to provide protection and we have done exactly that." He said the move was made "to prevent a situation from...

Thirty years ago, I wandered into the screening room of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Several hours later I wandered out, in a daze, in a fever dream. The world looked different to me. What had happened in the interim: I'd seen the 1913 silent French serial Fantômas....

Find my nest of salt/ Everything is my fault/ I'll take all the blame/ I'll proceed from shame... --Kurt Cobain, "All Apologies."

"My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with. We hope that he will continue to come...

President Obama did something which should be commonplace but which, in this terrible time, is now thought of as optional for high officials, which is to say, he obeyed the law. The law in this case required him, in response to an ACLU lawsuit, to disclose the Torture...

When the world was about to cave in; when Hank Paulson assured us that the only way to keep the world from caving in was to do what he said, now; when he told us it had to be unreviewable or else-- What he said to be done was this:...

The drunken boat that was the Modified Paulson Plan sank yesterday, capsized by a crew of pirate freemarketeers in the House. What this means: we won't be giving away a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the world's largest investment banks until sometime after the Jewish New Year.

But in...

In today's New York Times, we see the headline:

Goldman to Raise Capital, With $5 Billion From Buffett

And in the accompanying story written by Ben White, we can read the following:

The billionaire Warren E. Buffett will invest $5 billion in the investment bank Goldman Sachs,...

"Pay should be for performance, not for failure. But we need the system to work, so the reforms need to come afterward." --Treasury Secretary Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr.

Like the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, it's a thieves' jamboree. Cement trucks full of cash, just...

On May 3, 1971 I found myself in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. -- as did a lot of others, most young, mostly "disreputable," all appalled by the war in Vietnam. I was covering the manifestations for The Cornell Daily Sun, and had taken the precaution of obtaining a District...

Road Runner has once again avoided the trap, evaded the roadblock, meep-meeped his way past his pursuer. He gathers up momentum, runs off the cliff, glides in air, continues his unbroken sprint on the other rim of the canyon.

Wile E. Coyote attempts to pursue. (Why? It's his nature.)...

When I was fourteen -- the same age as my own son is now -- I came across, or, more likely, was given, a copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. I was in my black turtleneck phase, taking each Friday the E train to bohemia (West Village branch),...

In the way that the first robin can be a harbinger of spring, so the arrival of the season's first swag tells us that Sundance is just around the corner. Mine came 10 days ago. It was an invitation to one of the many lounges of Sundance. But the invitation,...

10. Letterman has been a strong supporter. As he said in his last outing before the show went dark, "You think the show's not funny now, wait 'til the writers go on strike. I mean it really won't be funny."

9. The AMPTP says that we're too crazy,

For most of the week, the AMPTP seemed very much a Coalition of the Unwilling.

On Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, they spent most of their time, and ours, reiterating in laborious detail their old positions. As Wolcott Gibbs once said, "backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind."

But then,...

The Writers Guild of America is a middle-class union. Almost half our membership receives no income from Guild-covered employment in any given year. As a result, the median income of Guild members from screen and television writing work is $5,000 per year. That's right: five thousand.

Among the lucky half...

For long time now, perhaps a year, I've been hearing (we've all been hearing) that the White House is planning to bomb Iran. As the neo-cons say, "Boys go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." It's a strategy so seductive that John McCain set it to

These two posts appeared, adjacent, one atop the other, on the splash page of HuffPost today.

The first:

Novak: Bush Isolated From GOP Lawmakers

The second:

Rocket Infiltrates Heavily Fortified Green Zone

Butting up against each other, the two headlines generate a metaphor: the White House as the Green Zone....

The Roberts Court--left to right, Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts--at the Gerald Ford service.

Look at the ties. Now look at the hands.

Kennedy is, by conventional wisdom, the "swing vote." Which way do you suppose he'll swing this term?

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The Rumsfeld memo hits with the force of revelation only if you were one of the three or four people who believed that the war was going well.

The New York Times says that the memo "acknowledges that the administration's strategy in Iraq was not working." Sadly, this...

Webb's lead over Allen is more than ten times larger than that of Bush over Gore in Florida when Roger Ailes called the presidential race for Bush in 2000. Tester's lead over Burns is as of this writing at least twice as large as Bush's 2000 Florida victory margin.

When...