Free Republic

Someday, people will realize that they can demand better buildings and cities, and they will do so. Extraordinarily rich and powerful people will sense a market in flux, will shudder, see their fortunes heading for the door, and tap their politicians on the shoulder. Architects will start making places people like. Look for a tipping point. It could have happened during the redesign process after Sept. 11, 2001. It did not, but it could have. Someday it will. When it does happen, it will not be because millions suddenly read a book called “A Theory of Architecture” (2006) by architectural...

Can we get a liberal journalist to investigate that? Let's wait and see. I doubt we'll get the same kind of curiousity from liberal journalists about that.

Unmentionable: Best-Selling Conservative Books and the Networks that Ignore ThemResearch reveals a glaring imbalance in network coverage of liberal best-sellers and comparable conservative titles. Since the 1940s, an appearance on The New York Times Best-Seller List has been the mark of commercial success for any book. Authors with titles on the list can count on media attention to help sell even more copies. Unless they are conservatives. Conservative books and authors have been very successful recently, as evidenced by their showing on the best-seller list. Since January 2009, conservatives enjoyed 95 total weeks on the list, compared to just 80...

Just an observation after reading this to my kids again. Obama, Oh Marvelous He, is King Yertle. Atlas Shrugged...Mack Burped...same thing. (Story below for those unfortunate enough to not have read it yet, or who might need a refresher). Keeping my eye out for Mack. And would love to see some photoshops of Obama as King Yertle, for those who are so inclined.

2010 is supposed to be the year of many things. I’ve heard it called the year of Android and more recently, the year of the ebook reader.I used to read a lot when I was a kid at the behest of my parents. My mom always tried to enforce a balance between video games and books. That unfortunately stopped as AnandTech took off. Most of my recreational reading turned into trying to understand datasheets or reading other reviews, the rest of the time was spent writing.My first and only ebook reader was Amazon’s Kindle 2, and while it didn’t reinvigorate...

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her...

[Excerpt] "Sometimes our technology, in creating these securities, outpaces our ability to cope with them." That's what Larry Fink told the New York Times in May 1987 when asked about Howie Rubin's trading disaster. In the past, Fink would have made that statement to a reporter and then celebrated with his team the fact that one of his competitors, particularly one like Merrill Lynch, which he saw as a pesky upstart in the field he aimed to dominate, was now being nailed with massive losses. But Fink wasn't celebrating, because, much like Howie Rubin, he had just gotten his first...

Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new—an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel—she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is...

CUNDY'S HARBOR, Maine On the big screen, the leader of the Dead Poets Society at an all-boys prep school was an inspirational teacher played by Robin Williams. In real life, it's a balding amateur poet who drives around in his "Poemobile," visiting and documenting the graves of dead poets and calling attention to their works. Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America, just finished a three-month road trip in which he visited the graves of 150 poets in 23 states. Skold boasts that he set a literary land speed record of 1.66 gpd (graves per day) over...

Stroll casually along the bulging bookshelves of your local bookseller, and you’re sure to see rows and rows of books chronicling the lives and times of the generation of men known reverently to us as the “Founding Fathers.”  These were the fearless men who boldly declared independence from the tyranny of the world’s most formidable empire and then set about establishing the steadfast moorings upon which to build the mightiest republic in the history of the world. This plot of land on the field of history is ripe for scholarship, and there is never an end to the “hows” and...

THE Canada geese were flying in a V formation, cruising about 80km/h above New York City. The aircraft piloted by Captain Chesley Sullenberger was travelling at 340km/h. In the four minutes that followed their collision 915m above the Bronx, the actions of Captain Sullenberger saved the lives of all 155 people aboard the US Airways Airbus A320.*** This week, Captain Sullenberger landed in London to receive the Master's Medal from the Guild of Air Pilots & Air Navigators on behalf of his crew and to tell the full story of his flight into the Hudson on January 15. His arrival...

Beloved cartoonist Berkeley Breathed had an unusual inspiration for his latest children's book, "Flawed Dogs." No it wasn't one of the Santa Barbaran's many rescued pit bulls, but it was one of Michael Vick's infamous dogs who was set to be put down. "The book happened because I came across both a picture and a quote at about the same time -- a picture of one of Michael Vick's fight dogs. It was set to be put down, but a shelter in Utah decided to take the dog and a few others at the same time and try to rehabilitate...

On Wednesday, the producers of the Broadway revival of the play "The Miracle Worker," about the early life of blind and deaf hero Helen Keller, announced that they'd chosen the young actress who will play her on stage this winter: 13-year-old Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin. The decision has unleashed immediate complaints from groups representing blind and deaf actors who feel that an actress from their community should have been considered for the role. Sharon Jensen, executive director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, told the New York Times "We do not think it's OK for reputable producers to...

Although the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, has surely been one of the most influential works of genre fiction ever written, ironically the central point of the book has nearly always been missed. Fortunately, a new novel co-written by Stoker’s great-grandnephew brings that aspect of the Dracula myth back to its appropriate place of primacy. Stoker’s clear intention in the original novel Dracula was to make the devil, literally Satan, real to readers by depicting a naturally occurring but preternatural stand-in, Count Dracula. This is indicated throughout the book by direct references to Dracula as a devil, and by imagery...

Mrs. O. The Face of Fashion DemocracyReview "The book traces Obama's wardrobe picks, from her wedding to the White House and includes interviews with designers like Maris Pinto, Isabel Toledo and Jason Wu, whose names have become synonymous with White House style' - In Style Magazine Product Description Celebrated for her style and substance, Michelle Obama has transformed the role of first lady and become a 21st century icon, attracting attention from all over the world. The qualities so admired in her - intelligence, strength and charisma - radiate through her personal style, which has united accessibility with high-wattage...

LONDON, England For Saudi Arabia's lone female cartoonist drawing is more than just satire, it's "a duty." "I think men have put women in an unfavorable position in this part of the world. They've put women in an oppressive situation," said Hana Hajjar, who works for the English-language newspaper Arab News. "I feel it is my duty towards women to speak out on their behalf, because I have the tools and venue to do so," she told CNN. Hajjar's drawings both challenge gender roles and critique political policy, often depicting inequality between the sexes and support for the Palestinian people,...

Plenty of celebrities issued crazy statements in their efforts to defend director and rapist Roman Polanski but none went as far as author Gore Vidal did when he labeled Polanski's victim a "young hooker." In an Oct. 28 interview with The Atlantic's John Meroney about a variety of topics, Vidal claimed he didn't "give a f---" about the Polanski case. "Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?" Vidal claimed "there was a totally different story at the time that doesn't resemble anything that we're now being...

Set in modern-day Nome, Alaska, where--mysteriously since the 1960s--a disproportionate number of the population has been reported missing every year. Despite multiple FBI investigations of the region, the truth has never been discovered. Here in this remote region, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler began videotaping sessions with traumatized patients and unwittingly discovered some of the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented.

TOKYO — In a move to promote serious study of Japanese manga, a university in Tokyo plans to open a library with two million comic books, animation drawings, video games and other cartoon industry artifacts. Tentatively named the Tokyo International Manga Library, it would open by early 2015 on the campus of the private Meiji University, and be available to researchers and fans from Japan and abroad. "Manga has been taken lightly in the past and there has been no solid archive for serious study," said Susumi Shibao, a library official at the university told AFP by telephone. "We want...

The man is accused of killing his then-girlfriend's daughter so the girlfriend could obtain custody of a granddaughter. A San Bernardino County sheriff's unit reopened the cold case last year. A San Diego lawyer who wrote a book on Internet dating was arrested Wednesday for allegedly killing his girlfriend's daughter 20 years ago so the girlfriend could gain custody of her granddaughter. Eric Fagan, 74, was arrested about 7 a.m. at his Chula Vista home as he was getting ready for his morning jog, said Jodi Miller, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which made the arrest....

Rules for Radicals Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat. Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage. Rule 6: A good tactic is one your...

VANITY Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn't deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning. Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.

I bought Glenn Beck's latest bestseller, "Arguing with Idiots," for the young adults in my family who work in Manhattan. All during last year's presidential campaign, they'd moan about the "idiots" they worked with who knew nothing about how the government worked; nor could they articulate any reason for voting for Barack Obama other than "He's not Bush" or "It's time we had a black president." Mr. Beck's book is highly entertaining and informative but, more importantly, it's also well researched. It's the title that bothers me, however, since I believe that just because people are not in agreement with...

Researcher whose father found old maps posits 2000 BC voyage to west coast History books tell us that the first Chinese settlers to Canada arrived in Victoria about 150 years ago, but a U.S. researcher says she has solid evidence that they came earlier. Some 4,000 years earlier. That would be 3,500 years before 1492, when European explorer Christopher "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Or 10,000 years after nomadic hunters from Eastern Siberia crossed the frozen Bering Strait during the Ice Age, a migration taken by modern scholars to account for North America's native population. Charlotte Harris Rees, a retired...

Norman Fulkerson, who has been voicing his conservative opinions on the Messenger-Inquirer editorial page for 11 years, has written a book about another conservative, Col. John W. Ripley USMC.... There was much to admire about Ripley, Fulkerson said, during a recent phone interview. Ripley's military career has been documented in other writings, Fulkerson said, but what he was most interested in was telling the other side of the war hero who in 1972 during the Easter Offensive in Dong Ha, Vietnam, blew up a bridge that "virtually halted the largest North Vietnamese offensive of the entire war." "An American Knight,...

While information on Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader, the Nook, has been trickling out for several days, the company unveiled the new $259 device on its Web site Tuesday a few hours before the official launch event in New York. As previously reported, the Nook, billed as the first Android-powered e-book reader, features not only a 6-inch E-ink screen but a color touch screen that allows you to navigate content and also can turn into a virtual keyboard for searches. Like the Kindle, the Nook has a built-in 3G wireless connection (AT&T is the carrier). However, the Nook also...

Peter Aykroyd, author of A History of Ghosts, enjoyed his son Danny's film Ghost Busters, which was, for a spell, the highest-grossing comedy of all time. However, he believes only one scene could hold up to the best paranormal science. "In defense of reality, the scene in the beginning, when the books start coming off the shelves, that's an exhibition of the poltergeist phenomenon and is very common," the 88-year-old Aykroyd says. "That scene resonated 100% factually. The bad scene was the one with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man." "You didn't like that," interrupts Dan Aykroyd, that film's co-writer and star,...

OCTOBER 16, 2009 Recipe for an Outrageous Cookbook A dish that calls for boiling a pig's head (use a blowtorch to dispense with any hairy patches). Liberal use of profanity. David Chang's confrontational approach to cookbook writing. By KATY MCLAUGHLIN David Chang, outside Momofuku Ko earlier this year, had never run his own kitchen when he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. Chef David Chang's first cookbook is long, laced with profanity and full of complicated, labor-intensive recipes, many of which require obscure ingredients like kochukaru (Korean chili powder) and sliced country jowl. In food circles, it's one of the...

LONDON -- Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100- and 200-meter record-holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions. Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood. Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle. These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male". "If you're reading...

NEW YORK – An online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning into a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com. Wal-Mart got things started Thursday, offering $10 prices on such upcoming hardcover releases as Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" and John Grisham's "Ford County," a cut of 60 percent or more from the regular cost. Wal-Mart will also offer free shipping. Amazon.com, the largest online bookseller, matched the $10 price, prompting Wal-Mart to take its offer to $9. By Friday morning, Amazon.com also had priced the books at $9. The price cuts come at a time when Seattle-based Amazon.com and...

Does anybody know why Amazon.com has dropped the price of Sarah Palin's book? I was going to wait until after it was on the shelf to buy it, but, Amazon dropped the price to $9.00. I'm pre-ordering today.

Book seller Barnes & Noble is expected to announce its own e-reader next week, and a new report states the device will sport both black-and-white e-ink and a multi-touch, iPhone-like color display. New information and photos of the device were provided to Gizmodo, which revealed that a majority of the device will have a traditional e-ink display, much like the Amazon Kindle, which provides superior battery life. It will be a 6-inch screen with an 800x600 pixel resolution. But the bottom portion of the device will have an LCD color display sporting multi-touch technology. It will be used to browse...

Joe says: Gorefan - My heritage includes the Adams of Massachusetts and the Herndons of Virginia. The Adams papers I am in possession of plainly state they looked to "Vattel's Law of Nations" for guidance in determining who might be qualified as a "natural born Citizen". (Yes, they capitalized "Citizen".) Do you actually believe there was no discussion of the topic by the Founding Fathers? Are you truly that ignorant of how well the Founding Fathers understood the law and its possible impact on future generations? It is very clear you haven't a clue how well educated and intelligent...

The other day, deep in Rego Park, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, Stanley Moscowitz and Walter Israel sat down at a Formica table for lunch at Ben's Best Kosher Deli on Queens Boulevard. Moscowitz, who's 53 and grew up in nearby Forest Hills, ordered first: matzo ball, tip of the tongue, roast beef, rye, Russian, onions and Dr. Brown's diet cherry drink. Israel ordered pastrami on rye bread. His son Jason ordered pastrami on white. In his defense, Jason did not ask for mayonnaise, but the combination of pastrami and white bread enjoys a certain...

"How could he think otherwise?" Alhamid asked. "To him, or to Tarnhorst, the notion of deliberately tailoring a program so that it would kill off the fools and the incompetents, setting up a program that will deliberately destroy the men who are dangerous to society, would be horrifying. They would accuse us of being soulless butchers who had no respect for the dignity of the human soul." "We're not butchering anybody," St. Simon objected. "Nobody is forced to go through two years of anchor setting. Nobody is forced to die. We're not running people into gas chambers or anything like...

Nervous Americans concerned about Islamic spies in the halls of power in Washington pushed the new "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America" up Amazon.com's rankings by more than a million places in just hours today, making it the hottest book in the nation as it topped Amazon's Movers & Shakers list. In "Muslim Mafia," co-author Paul Sperry, an investigative journalist and expert on terrorism, and P. David Gaubatz, a counter-terrorism investigator and former Air Force special agent, exhaustively document how the nonprofit CAIR operates under the ultimate purpose of making fundamental changes in the United...

Barack Obama’s dad was such an important but absent figure in his life that he devoted his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” to the search for details about his father’s life and how the quest helped forge a son’s identity. Now, a long-forgotten essay written 43 years ago by Obama’s father has surfaced, and its contents reveal much — not only about the senior Obama’s grasp of economic theory but also about the iconoclastic politics that, his son would later write, sent him into the spiral of career disappointment that concluded with his death in 1982 in his native...

Many years ago, I went to the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament in London to keep an appointment with the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark. He was the son of Kenneth (later Lord) Clark—the art historian and author of the Civilisation series—and the heir to Saltwood Castle, in Kent. He was also the author of a 1961 book, The Donkeys, which was a history of the British General Staff in the First World War. The title came from a famous comment that had supposedly been made at that epoch by a German military strategist. Told by...

The Generous Gambler Yesterday, while making my way through the crowd on the boulevard, I was brushed by a mysterious being whom I had always wanted to know, and whom I recognized immediately, even though I had never met him before. He undoubtedly also felt, in relation to me, an analogous desire, for as he passed he signalled to me with a meaningful wink and I hastened to obey him. I followed him attentively, and soon I descended behind him into a dazzling subterranean dwelling, in which shone a luxury the equal of which was not furnished by any of...

Jerome Corsi and Sean Hannity discuss how American sovereignty is being sold out. Who the main players are and their agenda to Globalization. Corsi calls Obama Post- America. Describing him as an Internationalist. Obama is going along with the agenda giving away sovereighnty in recent G20 and IMF agreements.

I am so excited about the plan to open Fulke Greville's tomb in St Mary's Church in Warwick. I have been a doubter about Shakespeare for years and I believe that Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke was the leader of a group of writers that produced the works of Shakespeare at her beautiful home Wilton House. A lot of people, including me are so interested in this latest developement because Mary and Fulke Greville were lovers and both wrote plays about Anthony and Cleopatra. You can find out about her at http://www.marysidney.com

We'll have what he's having If the idea of a heaping pile of thick, warm pastrami on rye gets you as hot and bothered as the female protagonist of When Harry Met Sally, you may have a problem. Then again, you may just really love smoked meat, like author David Sax. His forthcoming book, SAVE THE DELI: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, calls for a party of the carnivorous sort. At Deli-licious: A Celebration of the Jewish Deli in New York, garlic-breathed Heebs like Jelvis the Jewish Elvis and Borscht Belt comic...

The 400-year-old mystery of whether William Shakespeare was the author of an unattributed play about Edward III may have been solved by a computer program designed to detect plagiarism. Sir Brian Vickers, an authority on Shakespeare at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London, believes that a comparison of phrases used in The Reign of King Edward III with Shakespeare’s early works proves conclusively that the Bard wrote the play in collaboration with Thomas Kyd, one of the most popular playwrights of his day. The professor used software called Pl@giarism, developed by the University of Maastricht to...

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning are, in increasing amount: lack of precision in the original language, such as terms underdeveloped to convey new concepts introduced by Christ lack of precision in modern language translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one. Experts in ancient languages are helpful in reducing the first type of error above, which is a vanishing source of error as scholarship advances understanding. English language linguists are helpful in reducing the second type of error, which also...

Are Britain and Europe being swamped, overrun, defeated by a wave of mostly Muslim immigrants and their descendants? Or are Europe's ethnic problems the figment of a febrile political imagination - something created by racism, dishonesty and manipulation by extremist parties such as the BNP?*** Both sides will take lots of fodder for their arguments from a study released last week by the highly reliable Pew Forum On Religion And Public Life. According to the report, there are now 1.6billion Muslims, a quarter of the world's population. And they are distributed in surprising ways - there are more Muslims in...

Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America's most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual's anthology of post 9/11 commentary is taboo at Guantánamo's prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam. U.S. military censors recently rejected a Pentagon lawyer's donation of an Arabic-language copy of the political activist and linguistic professor's 2007 anthology Interventions for the library, which has more than 16,000 items. Chomsky, 80, who has been voicing disgust with U.S. foreign policy since the Vietnam War, reacted with irritation and derision. "This happens sometimes in totalitarian regimes,'' he told...

In his memoir subtitled "Death In The Dark: Vietnam 1968-1972" Master Chief Thomas Keith, a self-described "Navy brat," tells readers how he embarked on his chosen career as a SEAL. Evolving from the underwater demolition teams of World War II, the Navy SEALs were formally established in 1962 as a "small, elite maritime force to conduct ... clandestine, high-impact missions." The name comes from the fact that they are trained in all environments (sea, air and land), but Keith writes, "historically SEALs have always had 'one foot in the water.' " As involvement in the Vietnam War grew, the U.S....

Ron DiFrancesco was at his desk at Euro Brokers…on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center…when the plane struck the North Tower...It was 8:46 am on September 11, 2001… A few minutes later...the second plane struck… DiFrancesco is normally unflappable. He is a broker in a high-stakes business that demands steel nerves. But he is also slightly claustrophobic, and with the intensifying smoke, he began to panic…Then, something remarkable happened: “Someone told me to get up.” Someone, he says, “called me.” The voice, which was male but did not belong to anyone in the stairwell,...

Imagine moving to a place where you can leave your front door unlocked as you run your errands, where the community enjoys a winning ratio of playgrounds to potholes, where you can turn your kids loose at 3 p.m., not to worry, then see them in time for supper, where the neighbors greet those children by name, where your trouble-free high school feels like a de facto private school, where if you decide to play hooky from work, you can drive just twenty minutes and put your sailboat on the water, where the outdoor serenity is shattered only by each...

Well, this should settle all the rumors. Congrats, Bill, hey...it's an improvement from murdering people!