Politics

(via Adam Richardson)

That President of ours sure can give a good speech. Check out this clip from this commencement address at Arizona State University.My hunch is that Johnny Bunko wasn’t on the desk of his speechwriters, but Obama nonetheless touches on several Bunko lessons — from “Leave an imprint” to “Make excellent mistakes” to Reader Lesson 7: […]

In 1966, Robert Indiana gave the world a four-letter sculpture that soon became iconic.Today, on Design Observer, I saw a piece that pays homage to Indiana. (“Homage to Indiana” is totally a title for a mediocre independent film — Ed.) Like many works that have parodied Indiana’s work, this four-letter sculpture bears a superficial resemblance […]

Let’s get a mood check on America in the waning days of February 2009. CNN’s latest poll finds that close to “eight in 10 [Americans] say that things are going badly in the country, with just 21 percent suggesting that things are going well.”No surprise there.But here’s something weird: “Three out of four questioned say […]

Yesterday afternoon my family and I took in (literally) a stunning piece of art installed at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum here in Washington. To celebrate Presidents Day, artist Zilly Rosen created an enormous quasi-pointillistic dual portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, a photo of which I snapped with my iPhone. You might notice […]

My iPhone photos from today’s ceremonies here in D.C. aren’t very good, but this one’s a keeper — in part because the woman pictured here is standing on the steps of Constitution Hall, site of the notorious Marian Anderson incident.

Here’s Obama’s speech today as a Wordle “word cloud,” which give greater prominence to words that appear frequently in a text.

BusinessWeek reports that when Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries issued a 62-page report “about the country’s worrisome dependence on food imports,” it added a twist. The Ministry summarized their findings in a four-minute animated video, which you can watch below.  Maybe Peter Orszag should try this for his first budget. 

First came six-word autobiographies. Now Smith Magazine and the National Constitution Center are teaming up to collect suggestions for six words to inspire President-elect Obama and perhaps to include in his Inaugural Address. Here are some possibilities, both my own and selections from the Smith web site: Today the American story begins anew. We can, […]

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a terrific story about Igor Panarin, a respected Russian scholar and policy guru who’s peddling an audacious prediction:The United States of America will be no more by 2010.And it won’t be Russian missile doing us in. We’ll rot from the inside, says Panarin. (Kinda like the Soviet Union? — Ed.) […]