Word: sept
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Last Sept. 15, the venerable investment-banking firm of Lehman Brothers--saddled with a lot of dud real estate investments and unable to persuade its jittery creditors to keep lending it money--filed for bankruptcy protection. It was the largest bankruptcy ever in the U.S., but the really big news was what happened afterward. First came a financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order, followed by an unprecedented--and unprecedentedly expensive--effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things...
President Barack Obama warned in a speech on Wall Street Sept. 14 that "normalcy cannot lead to complacency." But normalcy is leading to complacency. Consider the financial reforms that Obama's Administration wants to push through Congress: the big ones are creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic-risk regulator and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much--and even they may not win congressional approval...
Jody Powell, who died Sept. 14 at 65, was the cooler of Jimmy Carter's two top young aides. (Hamilton Jordan was hotter, more passionate.) Powell was an excellent press secretary--funny, unflappable, totally devoted to the boss. He was the descendant of nine Civil War veterans and, as W.J. Cash wrote, he exemplified the breed: slouching, joking, undisciplined and brilliantly lethal...
...creator of the hit TV series M*A*S*H, Larry Gelbart, who died Sept. 11 at 81, perfected the careful art of blending drama and satire. In M*A*S*H, he managed to humanize soldiers even as he illustrated the absurdity of war. His knack for imbuing punch lines with social commentary earned him Emmy and Tony awards as well as the accolades of legends like Bob Hope, Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar. Gelbart began his career at 16 after his father, a Hollywood barber, bragged to entertainer Danny Thomas about his son's gift for gags. After...
...cool masculinity. Yet at 36, Neil Patrick Harris, who played a genius teenage doctor on Doogie Howser, M.D., has used rat-pack swagger to climb the hosting rope in record time, from emceeing the TV Land awards in April to the Tonys in June to the Emmys on Sept. 20. He's up for his own Emmy this year for his role as an over-the-top straight guy in the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. And he has parodied this image of suit-wearing cockiness by playing a hypermasculine version of himself in the Harold & Kumar movies...