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If You're in Chicago on Thursday...
...I'll be giving a lecture at the International House of the University of Chicago on May 6, starting at 4:30. Details here. The subject won't be the TSA! (Hint: Will be talking about relations with a...
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The Many Uses of the Autobahn
If you're anything like me, whenever you visit Germany and see cars roar down the Autobahn, you can't help asking yourself: Gee, I wonder what it would be like to land an A-10 "Warthog" right on this...
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A Note on Newsweek (long) (updated)
One thing I learned during my stint as a weekly news magazine editor* was how deceptively difficult this kind of journalism has become. Story selection? For a daily newspaper, it's easier. If there is...
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Just a Thought for the To-Read List: 'Dreaming' Comes to America
A few months ago, I generously offered advice for those who found themselves in the UK and were looking for something interesting to read. Now I can extend this service to readers in the Western...
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"The Fear Department"
In response to this item, about how the TSA would respond to the New York bomb threat, and this one about the closing of the Supreme Court's main entrance etc, several reader replies:1) About the...
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Baseball Economics, as Applied to Newsweek
Two days ago I argued that Newsweek's plight was fundamentally a "scale" problem. Apart from the long-term erosion of the news weeklies' original journalistic and economic raisons d'etre, Newsweek's...
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More on Autobahn Airports, With Special ß Feature
1) They're doing it in Pakistan too! 2) As for the real location of the German highway/airports mentioned here, the answer appears to be this bucolic area near Ahlhorn in Großenkneten,* Lower Saxony....
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Our Spam, Ourselves
I mentioned recently the interesting-but-weird abundance of Russian-language spam in my Gmail spam filter. Hypothesis offered by my wife: "How many of those 'Find a Russian bride' sites have you been...
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If I End Up Moving to Munster, Indiana ...
... this will be the reason: Munster's own Three Floyds Brewpub. I haven't yet been there, but from buying their wares in Chicago supermarkets I will assert that Three Floyds makes as consistently...
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If You Think You Have a Sense of the Oil Spill's Scale
Try this utility from Paul Rademacher's site, which overlays a scaled representation of the Deepwater Horizon spill onto a Google Earth view of any city you choose. (May require a Google Earth web...
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'China Today' #3: The Environment
The third in the series of conversations I've been having with Damien Ma, of the Eurasia Group, is now online, here. It's the third one down on the list on that page; previous two available there, and...
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The New "God Bless America"
SecDef Robert Gates gave a truly excellent speech two days ago. It was at the Eisenhower Library in Kansas; it revived and applied to modern circumstances Eisenhower's famed warnings about the effects...
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More Midwestern Beer
I mentioned recently that the excellence of Three Floyds beers is making me consider becoming a Hoosier. But I didn't mean to slight other excellent beers of the Midwest that I've gotten to know and...
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Home Again (Shanghai/Great Firewall dept)
Twenty three hours after I got up in Chicago, I drag into one of the nicest hotels in Shanghai and think, Back home! Fire up the computer to say hello to my family and find.... there are all sorts of...
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Google and the News
I'm on the other side of the world this next week, rather than being in the fray of the "future of the news" debates inside the US. But I hope you'll read my cover story in the new issue (subscribe!)...
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More on the Scale of the Gulf Spill
Several days ago I mentioned Paul Rademacher's very powerful application that lets you envision the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (as of then) by mapping it against any urban area you choose....
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Continuing the "Beer Bottles + Skyline" Motif
With previous entries here (Chicago, south side) and here (Shanghai, Puxi side), now just for the sake of completeness and nostalgia we have a Pudong-side view of the city, as setting for "Shanghai's...
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Google-and-the-News Followups
There is a wider variety of reaction to my current article (I've got to say it: subscribe!) than I can deal with in any comprehensive way at the moment. For now, a restatement of a central theme, then...
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Somehow I Found This So Touching (Shanghai Expo Dept)
At the Czech pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo this week.Ambassadors of Czech culture: In the refreshment area (real Czech beer):Display of Czech aerospace tradition (large-scale flight simulator,...
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What's Special About Today, May 15th?
It's International Learn To Fly Day!Details here, including gala special offers. Hey, what are you going to do on this Saturday that would be more interesting? UPDATE: Sorry I did not originally...
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