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The Tribulations of High School Chess
Sports are glorified because sports are clean. There’s always a clear loser and a clear winner. In the thrill of the moment, when caught up in our favorite spectator sports, we Americans know who to root for. Michael Weinreb, in The Kings of New York, takes on the challenge of casting chess, the pastime of…
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Ugly Betty: Revolution or Repackaging?
Television is the opiate of the masses. Surfing channels these days, we see the screen jump from images of skinny models bickering, to bedraggled people on a desert island, to co-eds living together as they have been for the past ten years. They don’t call it a guilty pleasure for nothing. At first, the shiny…
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Dreams from my Father
Senator Joe Biden wasn’t the first to peg Barak Obama as counter to a stereotype. Indeed, before Obama became a U.S. Senator, before he became a presidential candidate for that matter, he was generally known as an “articulate,” “well-spoken” black man. “Doesn’t he look clean-cut?” Obama’s co-community organizers would say when introducing him to volunteers…
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Taller People Earn More
I did quite a number of less-than-brilliant things this summer. I fell off a treadmill, went running at night alone in the park where Chandra Levy was killed, and scraped my shoulder by falling off a Radio Flyer wagon. Until recently, I attributed these accidents to my being a klutz. But, now thanks to the…
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Bid Every Care Withdraw
“Are you going to the James Baker lecture?” a guy sitting across the table from me recently asked his friends over dinner. “Who’s James Baker?” one of the friends answered. “You know – an important person who went here.” “Oh. Screw that, man – no way I’m rushing off to some lecture after my three-hour…