Saturday/Sunday, Jan. 24-25, 2009

WEB BOHEMIAN Weekend edition(Saturday/Sunday, Jan. 24-25, 2009)
(1)- NEWSPAPER HISTORY -- Newspapers date to the sixteenth century; they started as newsletters and news books, sometimes printed, sometimes copied by hand, and sent from one place to another, carrying word of trade and politics. The word “newspaper” didn’t enter the English language until the sixteen-sixties. Venetians sold news for a coin called a gazzetta.

(2)- PONDERINGS – Man was created a rebel,” Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor admonishes the silent Christ in his prison cell, “and how can rebels be happy?” The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding—or creating—one’s own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative, inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few.

(3)- WHO WAS WATCHING? -- Among all the postmortems that will inevitably follow the dramatic implosion of the global financial system, there will doubtless be one on how it was covered in the press. Was there sufficient information in the public domain about the dangers of financial derivatives and subprime mortgages? Did news organizations, facing their own crises of liquidity, have sufficient resources to monitor and analyze the available data?

(4)- EARLY OBAMA INTRVU -- In 1990, Boston Globe reporter Linda Matchan interviewed a Chicago community organizer who had just become the first African-American head of the Harvard Law Review. The following is an early glimpse of Obama who became the first black president of the influential Harvard Law Review after a marathon 17-hour selection process that pitted him against 18 other candidates.

(5)- FOOD AND WOMEN -- New research on the brain suggests that women unconsciously have a tougher time resisting their favorite foods than men do. "This gives us another piece to put into this puzzle," said Dr. Gene-Jack Wang, the study's author, who speculated that women may have more trouble saying no to food because they sometimes have to eat for two.

(6)- SECURITY COMPROMISED -- The Washington Post has reported that Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processor that services "more than 250,000 businesses," has had more than 100 million transactions compromised via malicious software that was installed on its network; it will likely turn out to be the largest data breach ever reported.

(7)- SUZANNE NOSSEL -- Who’s Suzanne Nossel? She’s in her late thirties, she has the strawberry-blond ringlets of a Dickens heroine, and she’s the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch. When she wrote the “Smart Power” article, she was an executive at Bertelsmann, the media company, but she has had a finger in the Democratic foreign-policy pie since forever.

(8)- OBSESSIVE – “A disease with a history,” writes Lennard Davis in this fascinating but flawed study of morbid fixation, “is more understandable than a disease without one.” Illness confines us to a perpetual present and straps us to the bed of our own pain, but we ought to recall that our aches are often accidents of medical history, no more (and no less) real than the gripes of our forebears. The modern depressive is kin to the renaissance melancholic…

(9)- DIFFICULT TO BE AROUND -- He smashed the china, soiled the sheets, sunbathed nude and was either drunk or stoned - Arthur Rimbaud was an impossible house guest, but he liberated the true poet in his lover Verlaine, writes Edmund White. In the early autumn in 1871 Rimbaud fired off a letter to Paul Verlaine, his favourite poet. Rimbaud sent off a few more poems to Verlaine two days later. Then came the fateful response from Paris.

CARTOON COMMENTARY

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