Word: kindness
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Joining Pepsi's quest for O-mentum are advertisers like Audi ("Progress is beautiful") and Ikea ("Embrace change"). Trying to make a buck off the zeitgeist is an old story, but these ads also capture a particular mood of today. America right now is like some kind of agitated subatomic particle holding two opposite charges at once: dread and excitement. Just so, these ads convey both desperation--someone, please, buy something!--and the thrilling sense that a big change is afoot in the country's mind-set. (See pictures of the best Obama inaugural merchandise...
...Obama can turn a feel-good moment into improbable changes in our discourse, he might be helped by something that helped him pull off an improbable win: the Internet. It's true that new media have helped polarize politics by creating echo chambers of agreement. But the kind of social media the Obama campaign used, like Facebook, also help people broaden their spheres and see how they are connected with people who are different from them. And they're popular among the same young people who are turned off by the old political dualisms and categories...
...bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear...
...speaking of advances, books are also leaving behind another kind of paper: money. Those cell-phone novels are generally written by amateurs and posted on free community websites, by the hundreds of thousands, with no expectation of payment. For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They're circulating outside the economy that spawned them...
Getting Iran's help in Iraq--and persuading it to give up its quest for a nuclear bomb--will require abandoning our efforts at regime change, muting our human-rights concerns and accepting an Iranian sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf. Obama's opponents will probably depict that kind of deal as defeatist, an admission of the limits of American power in the Middle East. But those limits already exist; the U.S. just hasn't acknowledged them...