To the English-Speaking Union last night, after a day in which Peter Mandelson’s score-settling memoirs had been causing ructions in the Labour Party. The occasion was an evening dedicated to Mark Twain, to mark the release of his unexpurgated autobiography and its serialisation in Granta. The Canadian actor Kerry Shale, doing the readings, was thoroughly [...]

Music to lift the tone of an election campaign? Laura Barton, in her Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll column in The Guardian yesterday, suggested Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding (with music by Clive Langer and lyrics by Elvis Costello). I’d add Sam Cooke’s contribution to the Civil Rights struggle, which itself [...]

Sam O’Hare wanted to show “the rhythms, pulses and movements” of a day in the life of New York, so he combined 35,000 still photographs, shot from rooftops, penthouses and balconies, into a single film. Watch out for the diggers, which seem less like machines than greedily pecking mini-dinosaurs. For all the technical details, see his [...]

You can still rely on The New York Times not to get carried away. Here’s a headline from today’s paper:
Web Site for Woods Is Drawing Attention
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Tiger Woods’s personal Web site has had an increase in visitors since he issued a statement about his car accident on Nov. [...]

Lovely story in the New York Times today about a man who has earned half a million dollars over the past 10 years in the betting shops of Manhattan. But he’s not a bookie or a punter. He’s a stooper: he picks up the betting slips that others have thrown away.

Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, has a great set of pictures on the theme of autumn.

What a refreshing response from Obama! The US president was asked yesterday why it had taken him a couple of days to condemn executives of the insurance firm AIG for taking bonuses after ruining the company. He answered: “It took a couple of days because I like to know what I am talking about before [...]

Did you recycle carrier bags and bin bags in 2008? How? By using them twice or three times instead of once? You weren’t really trying. Look what Joshua Allen Harris, a New York artist, does with his:

The freshest news in New York today was not on TV, radio or the upstart web but in the inky pages of The New York Times. Maybe that alone should have tipped off commuters who were given free copies of the paper at some of the city’s busiest stations. “IRAQ WAR ENDS” said the splash. [...]

Think about this next time you’re on a plane coming into land in the US: there is such a shortage of air traffic controllers that the authorities are ”accelerating” the training of new ones, according to The New York Times. The good news: they start on a simulator — what one instructor describes as “a big Xbox”. And [...]