Blake Gopnik defines what makes one great:
Mona Lisa herself has been variously described as straightforwardly cheerful (in her own era), as brimming with femme-fatale lust (in the vixen-obsessed 19th century), and as cryptic and opaque (the 20th-century view). … What a great portrait really needs to do is act as a vehicle for what people already know about someone.
The Daily What says, "I’ve been given all the assurances in the world that Scarlett is merely taking a terrifying nap."
Siobhan O'Connor has her doubts about the above chart:
According to their tallying, vegans have the least expensive diets, and meat eaters have the priciest, which certainly flies in the face of the arguments that vegetarianism is a choice limited to the hippie fringes and the bourgeoisie.
I like the message, but I take issue with some of the numbers. For instance, I don't know where they are getting their yogurt, and I know New York is expensive and everything, but I can't find a single serving of healthy yogurt for 80 cents anywhere I do my groceries, and a tuna cheddar melt for just over a buck seems unrealistic.
And the Democrat is suddenly ahead.
Mark O'Connell contemplates them:
You finish the last page of a book like Gravity’s Rainbow and—even if you’ve spent much of it in a state of bewilderment or frustration or irritation—you think to yourself, “that was monumental.” But it strikes me that this sense of monumentality, this gratified speechlessness that we tend to feel at such moments of closure and valediction, has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it. When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow—a Ulysses or a Brothers Karamazov or a Gravity’s Rainbow—there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to it but which, more problematically, is often difficult to separate from an awe at the fact of your own surmounting of it.
" I don’t think that the president said it was necessary to return to the 1967 lines, but rather that we need to start the discussion based on the 1967 borders," – Ehud Barak.
A reader writes:
As an Israeli citizen, I want to thank you for this post. You should know that many Israelis actually do understand that we should go back to 67' borders, but the environment here is so toxic – Not unlike what the far right has done in America - that you just can't say anything out loud or you'll be denounce as almost Antisemitic. What's going on here is awful, Bibi is taking us straight to hell. It's amazing to think that if Ulmert was still in charge, he would have cut a deal with Obama a year ago. What a waste to finally have an American president who is so sincere, serious and decent, at a time when there's no leader, no vision and no hope in Israel.
Another:
Though this is not surprising in the least, imagine for a moment that the leader of a country that is openly contemptuous of a sitting Republican president pays a visit to America, is given a warm reception by the Democratically-controlled Congress (indeed, even given the opportunity to address a Joint Session of both houses), and invited to address the leading liberal/Democratic think tanks and lobbying groups.
Can you picture the interminable cries of treason from the right? Can you picture the steam-blowing outrage from Fox News, Rush, etc regarding the warm reception given to a leader antagonistic toward a Republican White House?
And yet, when the roles are reversed, nothing.
Surprise! The Washington Post actually sides with a foreign government against the president.
All the blame must be laid not at the feet of Netanyahu (who is rendered blameless for his belligerence and contempt for the American president) nor of the Palestinians (although they come in for a shellacking at the start). No: it's Obama committed a foul by actually stating out loud that the 1967 border is the obvious line around which a territorial settlement can be made. He violated the Washington consensus that the American president must let Israel direct and guide his entire relations with every other power in the Middle East. Hence this:
This is not a big change in U.S. policy. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, along with previous Israeli governments, have supported the approach. But Mr. Netanyahu has not yet signed on, and so Mr. Obama’s decision to confront him with a formal U.S. embrace of the idea, with only a few hours’ warning, ensured a blowup.
So until a foreign leader signs on in advance to US policy, the American president is unwise to state a position. Even after years now of trying to get the slightest serious concession from Israel. There is a mindset here that treats Israel not simply as an ally but as unique among all allies in being able to dictate to the US what its foreign policy will be. That is unhealthy for all parties. But so much of the Washngton machinery is devoted to it.
Hartville, Wyoming, 3.18 pm
Researchers had subjects view different images with each eye; the image paired with negative gossip tended to stay longer in subjects' consciousness. Ed Yong editorializes:
Our brain offers up a view of reality that allows us to get on with our lives, but that’s always somewhat of an illusion. It might be disheartening to learn that we focus on the bad rather than the good, but it is also easy to imagine why this is. As [researchers Eric Anderson and Erika Siegel] write, “this preferential selection for perceiving bad people might protect us from liars and cheaters by allowing to us to view them for longer and explicitly gather more information about their behaviour.”
Max Fahey introduces a talented young nerd:
Behind every badly-read line of video game dialog there is an equally horrific voice actor. Face actor Dean Lauderdale channels fifty of the worst, possibly redeeming them in the process.
The Dish 