Unlike the Kennedy dynasty, who always knew how to pay off people who might make trouble, the Windsors can't bring themselves to part with any royal trinkets.
I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.
Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.
What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.
Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.
Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
Romney has become reluctant to say that human activity causes global warming, and even in his greener days he was always somewhat cagey about which remedies he'd support.
One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster's favor is crudely partisan: 'Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we'll want to block the other side's extremist agenda.'
To cut the federal budget without cutting entitlements is like giving up chocolate-chip cookies and then deciding it's OK to eat the ones that don't have any nuts.
At MTV, although the audience is smaller, I found it more interesting to deliver news to a specific group of people, because my story then did not have to try to be all things to all people.
Online, you have things like Slate Magazine, which has a lot of commentary and analysis of stories, so it gives you a fuller picture. I would compare that to a news magazine or the New Republic.
Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed.
Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.
A free Net may depend on some wisely developed and implemented locks and a community ethos that secures the keys to those locks among groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose rather than in the hands of one gatekeeper.
One repressive state after another has had to face the dilemma of wanting abundant Internet for economic advancement, while ruing the ways in which its citizens can become empowered to express themselves fearlessly.
Thanks to iCloud and other services, the choice of a phone or tablet today may lock a consumer into a branded silo, making it hard for him or her to do what Apple long importuned potential customers to do: switch.
Citizens identify with something larger than themselves - if one's country is attacked, it can feel like a personal attack in a way that a fellow bank customer's account theft does not feel like a personal invasion.
When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.
My grandfather, Harry Ferguson, was a butcher in Hill of Beath; so even though my grandparents lived in some poverty, we got loads of beef. My grandmother, Meg, was a fine Scottish cook who did slow cooking.
I think it's mental to pay for water. Where is that water coming from? Are they in the hills puttin' it into bottles when years ago it used to roll down and go into the lakes?
