All Salon

Meghan McCain: I'm a problem? What about Bristol?

Tracy Clark-Flory — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:48:00 PDT

Meghan McCain stopped by "The Daily Show" last night to promote her new book "Dirty Sexy Politics," which has been reviewed as being neither very dirty nor very sexy -- but the 25-year-old did get in a marginally dirty dig toward Bristol Palin.

Toronto: The devastating, dystopian "Never Let Me Go"

Andrew O'Hehir — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 07:30:00 PDT

I've never been to this city or its ginormous but famously friendly film festival before. Indeed, for a person who claims to be worldly, I've spent very little time in Canada and probably hold the most hackneyed kinds of Yank stereotypes about the place. I'm not likely to know Toronto very well after this week either, but I'll sure become acquainted with the insides of its movie theaters, even while taking in a tiny percentage of the 300 or so films on display here. I spent an hour or so today strolling through the diverse and charming street life of Queen West, just north of downtown Toronto, and encountered that distinctive quality of Canadianness, which sometimes feels American and sometimes feels English but ultimately isn't quite either.

Steve Kornacki on "Hardball"

Salon Staff — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 06:25:00 PDT

Quran-burning saga boosts Palin-style Islamophobia

Ned Resnikoff — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 05:30:00 PDT

Pastor Terry Jones might not be an expert in theology, politics or basic human decency, but he more than compensates with media savvy. He can wring every last drop of press attention out of even a retreat, as he demonstrated last night when he announced the cancellation of Burn a Quran Day and then, not four hours later, issued a semi-retraction, claiming that he'd been misled (those sneaky Muslims!) and suggesting he might still burn some Qurans after all.

How (and why) the media made Terry Jones a star

Justin Elliott — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 04:01:00 PDT

When Gen. David Petraeus first spoke out against Pastor Terry Jones' planned Quran burning in a Wall Street Journal article published Monday, the story exploded in the U.S. media, going from a sideshow to the dominant national media controversy of the week. As Yahoo News reported, it was on the front page of more than 50 newspapers Thursday -- more than the total number of members of Jones' fringe Florida church.

Massive blast, fire in San Francisco suburb

TREVOR HUNNICUTT, Associated Press — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:34:00 PDT

Fire crews flooded the ruins of burning homes with water early Friday after a massive explosion sent flames roaring through a neighborhood in the hills south of San Francisco, killing at least one person, injuring many others and destroying more than 50 houses.

Federal judge says "Don't ask, don't tell" is unconstitutional

Joan Walsh — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:10:00 PDT

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips ruled late Thursday that the U.S. military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy is unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment rights of gay and lesbian service members.

Johns doing just fine without Craigslist

Tracy Clark-Flory — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:32:00 PDT

For the past four years, Alex has regularly used Craigslist to set up illegal romps with prostitutes. The 28-year-old is worried that the shuttering of the site's adult services section will hurt his hobby -- only, not in the ways you might think. Online sex work isn't going anywhere, he says, but the closure is likely to make it harder for him to find his type of girl: young and inexperienced.

"The Romantics": A "Big Chill" for this decade?

Andrew O'Hehir — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:30:00 PDT

In "The Romantics," a pleasantly lo-fi ensemble movie written, directed and produced by Galt Niederhoffer (and based on her own novel into the bargain), we've got the collision of two or maybe three achingly meaningful narrative and cinematic modes. It's a wedding movie! It's a country-house movie! (Arguably, the wedding-at-a-country-house movie, almost always set on the New England coast, is already its own genre.) It's one of those "Big Chill"-type reunion movies, where an entire generation -- or at least its richer, whiter, better-looking microcosm -- faces the fact that it's not as young as it used to be and that its dreams have, alas, turned to dust!

Roundup: Playboy for the blind

Tracy Clark-Flory — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:30:00 PDT

I like to tell people that my job requires me to read the entire Internet every day, and I only write about a minute percentage it. That means you're spared the multitudes of cute animal videos that I have to watch just to recover from writing posts about, say, gang rapes in Congo -- but it also means that plenty of worthwhile news also goes by the wayside. So, I'm bringing back link roundups, which longtime readers might remember, and hopefully all will enjoy.

My paper of record

Jennifer Egan — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:30:00 PDT

In our era of sleek, glistening, multifarious multitasking handsets, I'm still lugging around the same chubby, scuffed blue leather planner I've owned since around the time of Operation Desert Storm. It's cumbersome, unsightly and not terribly functional; the address pages are falling out despite the fact that I've fortified their frayed binder holes with Scotch tape, and the book is so bulky that it's often hard to cram into my purse or backpack, forcing me to leave it behind.

"The Hare With Amber Eyes": A Jewish family's mesmerizing five-generation journey

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:01:00 PDT

There are many family memoirs whose stories are as enticing as Edmund de Waal's. There are few, though, whose raw material has been crafted into quite such an engrossing and exquisitely written book as "The Hare With Amber Eyes."

Eating Burger King's roundtable-size Pizza Whopper

Francis Lam — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 18:01:00 PDT

Here's a rule for you: Be wary of any food that requires six capital letters to spell out its name, eight if you count the TM. But, because it is my duty to you, I have cast all my cautions to the wind and decided to eat the Burger King New York Pizza Whopper.

The offshore windmill innovation gap

Andrew Leonard — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:17:00 PDT

You could not ask for a more drastic demonstration of the contrast between how the United States and China are rolling out renewable energy technologies than the current state of offshore windmill deployment in the two countries.

Thursday link dump: Tattoo Yoo

Alex Pareene — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:10:00 PDT

Lisa Murkowski will not be treated with Lieberman-style kid gloves if she decides to pull a Lieberman, because the GOP is a bit tougher about these things.
Andy Stern has some optimistic plans to about predator drone strikes!
Good for torture-monster Jay Bybee, for his important decision on tattoos and free speech. (Of course, John Yoo probably actually wrote it.)

Palin endorses gay-baiting, anti-sex Senate candidate

Alex Pareene — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:01:00 PDT

In Delaware, ultra-conservative Christine O'Donnell is running for the GOP nomination for senator against moderate old Mike Castle. Most Republicans -- even ones who consider Castle a terrible RINO -- can't bring themselves to support O'Donnell, because O'Donnell is gross and crazy. Like, for example, she keeps insinuating that Castle is gay. And she is also opposed to masturbation.

U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan at 1,176

The Associated Press — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:33:00 PDT

As of Thursday, Sept. 9, 2010, at least 1,176 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count.

Terry Jones cancels Quran burning

Alex Pareene — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:15:00 PDT

Radical cleric Terry Jones has apparently decided not to burn Qurans on 9/11. So ... that's that! Everyone wins, but Terry Jones -- whose joke of a church has received a staggering amount of free publicity over the weekend -- wins the most. According to early reports, Jones talked to Cordoba House imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and Rauf agreed to move his supposed "ground zero mosque" from its proposed site, which was never ground zero. In exchange, Jones agreed to not burn copies of Rauf's holy book.

Apple as a news censor: No way to run an app store

Scott Rosenberg — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:25:00 PDT

For all of you out there in media-land who still think that the iPad represents salvation for old business models and who welcome the App Store as a new platform for distributing content, I recommend a reading of Apple's new App Store Review Guidelines as helpfully summarized by Daring Fireball's John Gruber. (It seems you have to be a registered Apple developer before you can actually read the guidelines in full, but they're available at Gizmodo.)

How everyone got Orszag and Obama's tax cut positions completely wrong

Alex Pareene — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:15:00 PDT

I recently started receiving e-mails intended for Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida nutjob who is planning [Update: And just called off] a publicity stunt the same day that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck planned their own publicity stunt. (On the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's biggest and worst publicity stunt of the century, so far.) This is because many people on the Internet are Internet illiterate. They Google "Quran burning pastor e-mail address" and my byline -- with my e-mail address attached -- pops up. And they e-mail me. They don't care that the address contains the name of a longtime liberal online magazine, and that the site they found the address on contained my name, which is not "Terry Jones." Google sent them an e-mail address when they asked for one. So they used it.