Word: backgrounders
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First, though, a little background on stocks for the long run. The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds--and certainly not stocks--were the best long-term investment. At the time, this was conventional wisdom on Wall Street. Bonds were for investment, stocks for speculation--and, in those pre-SEC days, for manipulation. But when he investigated the historical record, Smith recounted later, "supporting evidence for this thesis could not be found." Instead, he discovered that over every 20-year span...
...Future Fault Lines But Sotomayor's unique background and views about race and gender are likely to become more important over time. In coming years, there may well be challenges to the death penalty, for example, on the grounds that it is imposed in a racially discriminatory way. The court rejected that claim in 1987, but Sotomayor might be sympathetic to it. In 1981, as a member of the board of directors of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, she was part of a committee that recommended that the fund oppose the reinstatement of the death penalty...
...been around for less than a month, but it's already getting about 6,000 hits a day. In part that's because the qualifications for entry are minimal. Anyone bored, lonely, grumpy or dejected (preferably all four) is welcome. Smeared makeup is a plus. So is a dingy background, like a fast-food joint or a room with wood paneling...
Judging from his dramatic introduction in the East Room, the President is dazzled by his nominee's Puerto Rican background. Obama has an unfortunate tendency to conflate personality and principle. "I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents," he said during his national-security speech at the National Archives in May. As if there were any American for whom that is not true. Or as if ethnic minorities can make that claim more plausibly than other Americans. (See pictures of Judge Sonia Sotomayor...
...writer’s humble background became a factor later, when the Signet Society—Harvard’s social club of arts and letters—almost did not accept Updike into their cloistered circle, since he could not pay the membership fee. Then-Crimson President Michael Maccoby ’54, who nominated Updike to the Signet, said that he convinced the Signet to waive Updike’s fees after telling them that if they did not allow him in, they would regret it for the rest of their lives...