Peter Krupa

Alec Baldwin. NATIONAL TREASURE.

From Slate.com:

Over the last two decades, the FDA has become increasingly open to drugs designed for the treatment of depression, pain, and anxiety—drugs that are, by their nature, likely to mimic the banned Schedule I narcotics. Part of this is the product of a well-documented relaxation of FDA practice that began under Clinton and has increased under Bush. But another part is the widespread public acceptance of the idea that the effects drug users have always been seeking in their illicit drugs—calmness, lack of pain, and bliss—are now “treatments” as opposed to recreation. We have reached a point at which it’s commonly understood that when people snort cocaine because they’re depressed or want to function better at work, that’s drug trafficking; but taking antidepressants for similar purposes is practicing medicine. 

Now that New York Times columnists have rejoined the land of the living, I once again will have to stop periodically and ask myself the question: What in God’s Holy Name is the point of Maureen Dowd?

This just in: James Frey has sold a novel titled Bright Shiny Morning to HarperCollins for - rumor has it - one million dollars. Depending on who you ask, it might actually be a book of short stories.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me I have to go write my memoirs about those harrowing years I spent in the wilds of Vietnam.

“A Designer Gives Lessons on What’s Sexy,” says a New York Times headline. It really made me wonder - what does the homosexual Marc Jacobs think makes a woman look sexy? According to the pictures: painfully skinny, with no hips and no breasts.

They look sort of like… well… adolescent men?

This morning, Slate.com’s always-delightful Jack Shafer skewers a Russian government advertising supplement that appeared in the Washington Post:

Back in the 1990s, Regardie’s magazine attempted to parody the foreign-nation advertising supplements that occasionally run in the Post,albeit to little success, because you can’t parody state propaganda. The only way to slog through the stilted, typo-marred copy of “Russia: Behind the Headlines” is to impose a Boris Badenov-style Russian accent on the stories and edit out the articles the and a as you read along. Sentences such as “Russia’s Central Bank has declared the necessity of a symbol for the ruble, one that would eventually be in league with the $ dollar and € euro signs on the world market” suddenly become bearable. Sentences such as “President Putin promised to create the National Russian Language Foundation, which would promote Russian language and culture all over the world” become delightful.

‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ - A Pakistani-American novelist gives a pretty damn fair lecture on American influence, foreign policy, etc.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. It will come his way no matter how kind, generous or humble he may be.

But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Religion Beat Becomes Test of Faith - LA Times reporter and former budding Catholic William Lobdell writes about his years covering ugly stories on the religion beat and how it soured him on the whole thing.

Father Vincent Gilmore — the young, intellectually sharp priest teaching the class — spoke about the sex scandal and warned us Catholics-to-be not to be poisoned by a relatively few bad clerics. Otherwise, we’d be committing “spiritual suicide.”

As I began my reporting, I kept that in mind. I also thought that the victims — people usually in their 30s, 40s and up — should have just gotten over what had happened to them decades before. To me, many of them were needlessly stuck in the past.

But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.

A Fine Romance - New Yorker film critic tries to sort out what the hell is going on with all these new romantic comedies featuring sloppy, boorish, charismatic men and professional, responsible, dull women.

There they are, the young man and young woman of the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years—the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance. Stephen Frears’s “High Fidelity” (2000), which transferred Nick Hornby’s novel from London to Chicago, may not have been the first, but it set the tone and established the self-dramatizing underachiever as hero. Hornby’s guy-centered material also inspired “About a Boy” and “Fever Pitch.” Others in this group include “Old School,” “Big Daddy,” “50 First Dates,” “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Failure to Launch,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up,” and—this summer’s hit—“Knocked Up.” In these movies, the men are played by Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Adam Sandler, John Cusack, Jimmy Fallon, Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black, Hugh Grant, and Seth Rogen; the women by Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Katherine Heigl. For almost a decade, Hollywood has pulled jokes and romance out of the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.

Sushi robots. Seriously. Robots that make sushi. Gmail ads can be so weird…

A U.S. company recently announced the discovery of roughly $500 million worth of gold coins in a sunken British warship. The Spanish, however, are suspicious that the ship (the British ship, but whatever) was located in Spanish waters:

The Spanish Civil Guard, on request from the government, is investigating whether the company could be charged with theft of Spanish heritage if the haul came from a ship found in Spanish waters….

Right. Theft of heritage in the form of gold. The Spanish would know something about that, wouldn’t they?

1. Salon.com - “You can’t stop the outsourcing tidal wave with a fork”

Money quote: The government could slow things down by granting subsidies to American firms to help compete with overseas companies. It could provide them incentives to buy locally. But, in the end, it can’t stop the flow of work and money from traveling around the world.

Clarinda [a typesetting company] was founded in Iowa when it served publishers in New York and Chicago because the technology of the day — trains and trucks, telephones and fax machines — allowed Midwestern states to be the outsourcing outposts of their day. At the time, the big cities were mourning the loss of their “printers’ rows.” Much of the desolation that was SoHo in New York was caused by manufacturing leaving the city for the hinterlands. Only decades later did it rediscover itself as a mecca of art and fashion — a rebirth that came on the back of the economic growth of the entire country.

2. Radar magazine: “Adam’s Apple: Adam Moss is America’s most celebrated editor. So why is New York magazine such a bore?”

Money quote: I noticed a curious thing about the “Sex and Love” issue that helps explain much of what ails New York: The central characters—not just the writers, but the people being written about—were all people likely to run into one another at a book party. The sex diaries featured both a publishing assistant and a magazine editor. Katie Roiphe, a New York City writer, wrote about her own life. Ariel Levy, a celebrated New York writer—and occasional Radar contributor—wrote about her wedding. Caroline Leavitt, a New Jersey (close enough) writer, wrote about the break-up of her marriage. These are people who are ostensibly supposed to take journalism’s reflective surfaces and turn them outward to the world. But Moss asked his writers to turn them inward.