Word: lating
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...electric car, so long promised, may finally be pulling into your driveway. In the U.S., a humbled General Motors just showed off one of its rare rays of light - the plug-in Volt, which GM says will get 230 miles per gallon when it hits roads in late 2010. Daimler is trialing an electric version of its baby Smart car and claims to get the equivalent of 300 m.p.g. In Japan this month, a confident Carlos Ghosn said that Nissan's upcoming, all-electric Leaf will get 367 m.p.g...
...figure out how to make a reasonably-priced battery. Then there's the question of infrastructure. Few Chinese live in houses with easy access to plugs to power their cars, and there is little infrastructure ready for public charging. But none of that takes away China's late-starter advantage. Chinese companies don't have a hundred years of auto manufacturing to unlearn before they tackle electrics. Just as the country skipped ahead on mobile phones, it could do the same on electric cars. "Electrics could be a way for Chinese automakers to leapfrog the rest of the globe," says...
Political satire, of course, has had its ups and downs in American comedy. The Eisenhower 1950s proved a fruitful time for outsider satirists like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and the counterculture years of the late '60s and '70s gave rise to stand-up social commentators like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Robert Klein. By the '80s, however, stand-up had mostly retreated to the home front (Roseanne Barr), the trivia of everyday life (Jerry Seinfeld) and the carefully nonpartisan "topical" jokes of Johnny Carson. In the George W. Bush years, political comedy came back in style, not just...
Letterman, typically, managed to turn the comedian's predicament itself into the joke. For months after Obama's Inauguration, the Late Show host trotted out a nerdy staff writer to read his latest attempts at coming up with Obama jokes - all of which turned out to be lamely repurposed Bush jokes. ("Barack Obama is so dumb, when he was governor of Texas, someone asked him what the capital of Texas is, and he said, 'Capital T.' ") Still, the edge that crept into Letterman's comedy during the Bush years has, if anything, only gotten sharper. (Yes, he was forced...
Indeed, the Obama era has helped clarify an often overlooked dichotomy in late-night TV comedy: the divide between the political satirists (Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Letterman much of the time) and the topical jokesters (Leno, Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon). O'Brien's middle-of-the-road, Carsonesque wisecracks in particular ("President Obama's approval ratings have slumped to an all-time low, which explains Obama's new Secret Service code name: NBC") are looking comparatively tame now that he's opposite the increasingly politicized Letterman - whose contempt for Bush-era politics comes through in his interviews as much...