Maureen Dowd writes an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times . My favorite sentence is the last one.
Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.
Thank God.
Katha Politt writes a very funny op-ed:
link :
Thank You for Hating My Book
By KATHA POLLITT
Published: July 12, 2006
ACTUALLY, this is good,” my editor said when my book got panned. “It’s a long review by a well-known person. It’s on a good page. It’s even got a caricature of you.”True, the drawing made me look like a demented chicken — a fat demented chicken — but as he explained, art meant space and space meant respect and respect meant attention. As my former husband put it, quoting Dr. Johnson as is his wont, “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed.” Even in the 18th century, it seems, there was no such thing as bad publicity.
Unless, of course, it’s your own. In the days that followed, I discovered something interesting about my writer friends. Here I had thought of them as anxious and sensitive, taking to their beds, or the phone, or both, when professional setbacks came their way. How often had I had the conversation about the culture editor with a grudge dating back to the reign of Tiberius, the clueless reviewer, the publicist who stops returning your phone calls and the publisher who suggests you consider another line of work?
But that was them. My bad review was something else again: my writer friends thought it was great. It was an opportunity, a platform, a megaphone, a lemon about to be transmuted into the most ambrosial lemonade. The very things that made it bad made it good: its frivolity displayed my depth, its confusion threw into relief my steely logic, its snark showed all too clearly who the real wit was.
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Joel Stein offers this opinion over at LaTimes :
Joel Stein: Doped-up cyclers don’t bug me
What’s so wrong with performance-enhancing drugs if everyone’s doing them?
July 11, 2006OF ALL THE sports events I could have picked to obsess over, the Tour de France hasn’t done much for my manliness. Until now. That’s because the day before this year’s race, several top riders were thrown out for being under investigation for taking performance-enhancing drugs. My athletes not only suffer for hundreds of miles up in the Alps in the July heat, they also inject drugs like guys who date Kate Moss.
Though cycling is now definitively the most doped-up sport in the world, narrowly edging out the International Doping Championships, this scandal hasn’t ruined my love of the sport. That’s because I don’t mind when my athletes take drugs to boost their performance.
