Looks like I need to go see The Passenger, a 1975 film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, being re-released this month. A rare glimpse into Nicholson's interest in arthouse movies and his trenchant critique of modern filmmaking... ben

Paul DePodesta, a Billy Beane acolyte prominently featured in Moneyball, was fired as GM of the Dodgers, I think unfairly given the number of injuries the team suffered and that they made the playoffs just a year ago. Give the guy more than two years! It'll be interesting to see how other Moneyballers fare in the next few years. Will it be the "fad" wears off, or does every team has a good stats guy in the front office, making the market inefficiency disappear? ben

After a whole season of badmouthing the White Sox constantly and making outrageous claims (like guaranteeing that the Sox would collapse, choke, etc.), it's time for Tribune columnist Eric Zorn to eat some crow. At least he knows how to admit when he's wrong, and to do so in style. A must-read for all those who criticize our unapologetic media. Or love the White Sox. ben

..by being born into an influential political family, then he wins the real lottery. Kudos to you, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), for all your hard work. William

About Food Network's omnipresent Rachael Ray, from a fawning spread in the Times. ben

What will become of our boy hero? Will he be made into a series of movies? Or will the author get the rights back? William

This makes me smurf: UNICEF bombs a Smurf village in a new ad to raise awareness for the consequences of war on children. William

I can't decide who's more out of touch here, the New York Times or the beer industry, in today's article on beer pong, aka Beirut. Why would the Times even print a response from someone at Budweiser saying that Bud-pong is supposed to be played with water? Why are the beer companies only now figuring out that college kids play these drinking games and attempting to market it? And why is the Times 10 years behind the beer-pong times? ben

on whether Maria Sharapova plans on remaining a Russian tennis player or defects to the U.S. William

not related to natural disasters that I have seen in a while. William

In the Washington Post, snippets from a report by Third-Way Democrats:

Since Kerry's defeat, some Democrats have urged that the party adopt a political strategy more like one pursued by Bush and his senior adviser, Karl Rove — which emphasized robust turnout of the party base rather than relentless, Clinton-style tending to swing voters.

But Galston and Kamarck, both of whom served in the Clinton White House, said there are simply not enough left-leaning voters to make this a workable strategy. In one of their more potentially controversial findings, the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans.

On defense and social issues, liberals espouse views diverging not only from those of other Democrats, but from Americans as a whole. To the extent that liberals now constitute both the largest bloc within the Democratic coalition and the public face of the party, Democratic candidates for national office will be running uphill.

Galston and Kamarck — whose work was sponsored by Third Way, a group working with Senate Democrats on centrist policy ideas — are critical of three other core liberal arguments:

• They warn against overreliance on a strategy of solving political problems by "reframing" the language by which they present their ideas, as advocated by linguist George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley: The best rhetoric will fail if the public rejects the substance of a candidate's agenda or entertains doubts about his integrity.

• They say liberals who count on rising numbers of Hispanic voters fail to recognize the growing strength of the GOP among Hispanics, as well as the growing weakness of Democrats with white Catholics and married women.

• They contend that Democrats who hope the party's relative advantages on health care and education can vault them back to power fail the test of political reality in the post-9/11 world. Security issues have become "threshold" questions for many voters, and cultural issues have become a prism of candidates' individual character and family life, Galston and Kamarck argue.

Their basic thesis is that the number of solidly conservative Republican voters is substantially larger that the reliably Democratic liberal voter base. To win, the argument goes, Democrats must make much larger inroads among moderates than the GOP.

Anonymous

Move over, cats in sinks, this is the future of the Internet. William