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...Lehman's fall shows the downside of using borrowed money. Even though Lehman has a 158-year-old name, it's actually a 14-year-old company that was spun off by American Express in 1994. AmEx had gobbled it up 10 years earlier, and it wasn't in prime shape when AmEx spat it out. To compensate for its relatively small size and skinny capital base, Lehman took risks that proved too large. To keep profits growing, Lehman borrowed huge sums relative to its size. Its debts were about 35 times its capital, far higher than its peer group...
...girl book: books by and about young women who lost their minds. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Joanne Greenberg's haunting I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Go Ask Alice, Sybil. There were books about crazy boys too, of course, such as Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express. But that's just boys. Everybody knows they're crazy. There was something disturbingly, voyeuristically hypnotic about those hippie Ophelias--electrode paste on their temples beneath their center-parted hair, Jefferson Airplane on the sound track, psychedelic chaos in their brains...
...Dane Cook and MLB crowds. During the primaries, Joe Biden took flak for his dopey description of Obama as "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Articulate is one of those racially tinged words that sports announcers use to express surprise that a black man can speak proper English, and clean hints at even uglier stereotypes. But the key word in that verbal vomit was mainstream, because it suggested that most blacks aren't. And the media perpetuates that idea by excluding middle-class blacks from their middle-class calculus...
...weekend, many news organizations had mounted a backlash of their own, running prominent pieces accusing the self-branded "straight-talking" McCain of deceiving voters. "The 'Straight-Talk Express' has detoured into doublespeak," announced the Associated Press, while the New York Times blared, "McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions...
...statement that life begins at conception. Chaput responded by denying that McCain held that position. When reminded by the interviewer that McCain has made public statements of support for embryonic stem-cell research on numerous occasions, Chaput switched gears, arguing that he would only have reason to express criticism if McCain had vocal Catholic support, "if a group came out [called] Catholics for McCain...