Andrew, I don't know if you've ever been to Tel-Aviv, but it actually is a Mediterranean city in its feel, look and food, so it's not just the filmmaker's vision. Tel-Aviv has the largest number of Bauhaus buildings outside of Germany, and you add the very upscale nature of so much of the place. I haven't been there in years, but I was struck by its chic, the blizzard of cell phones, its liberalism, its party atmosphere--and people kept taking us to restaurants that could have been in Italy or somewhere else in Europe. Tel-Aviv couldn't be more unlike Jerusalem.

So what about all the doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, teachers, florists, nurses and hundreds of thousands of other professionals and service providers in America before Ford came along? They surely weren't upper class or working class.

For more accurate to say Ford expanded the middle class.

The editor of my first collection of stories was the famed Michael Denneny at St. Martin's Press, who worked with Randy Shilts and other major gay authors, and established the Stonewall paperbacks which changed the face of gay publishing. I'll never forget when he said to me years ago that "The Boys in the Band" was so filled with rage because it was a "pre-revolutionary play." It deepened my understanding for a play that I saw mainly in terms of its surface wit. Back in the 1970s, it was a sacred text and gay friends would quote it like "All About Eve": "Who is she? Who was she? Who does she hope to be?"

After eight miserable years in "this low, dishonest decade," does anyone at still believe any news coming from this administration? Do you, Alex? Why?

Major news sources claim it was a "fainting spell."

I watched the video. Has anyone ever seen a fainting spell that takes so long, involves slurring of words, and semi-paralysis? It had to be some kind of stroke.

Another question: why is the administration lying?

Lack of pretension?

What I recall of this movie is the utter lack of wit, Brendan Fraser (who is hilarious in the first two Mummy films) constantly shouting "Ahhhhhh!!!!!!" and the sense that I was watching a Disney ride rather than a movie. It was witless, utterly lacking any of the charm, substance, and real fun of the original. And where was Gertrude the goose?

I deplore the decision to let him keep his chairmanship, and I revile him for what he said and implied about Obama. However, there is a bright side: the media will let this drop. Had he been ousted, we would have had a prime time soap opera: Will he bolt the party? Will he resign? It would have been endless and dispiriting. Now the melodrama can die down and fade away.

So what if he bolts? The GOP caucus is not air-tight, and some of their senators might vote on bills with the Democrats. But more importantly, it would serve Joe right to be ousted because he will find that hanging with his GOP homies won't be satisfying. He's not going to get any major committee co-chair, and after the initial rush of media coverage, he'll be what he's been for too long: a non-entity. I have been badgering my Senators Levin and Stabenow not to reward him for his egregious remarks about Obama and the Democratic Party, but I don't have any confidence they're listening.

No, Gladwell's in the selling books business and we can continue to expect a peppy but insipid book of his every few years trying to turn over-obvious dross into publishing gold. His last book was inane and empty--but very busy on the surface--and this one doesn't sound any better or deeper. He makes people feel they know something, or at least that they're hip. It's literary snake oil and truly, there's no there there.

I just saw QOS based on the review here, even though it's being panned widely. It deserves all the criticism and more, and SZ was way too kind. It's first of all not a Bond movie: no gadgets, no sex, no wit, no charm, no imagination, np coherence, no excitement.

If that's not bad enough, it rips off some of the Bourne movies, but inexpertly and stupidly, so that you can't really tell what exactly is happening during frantic action sequences, but you don't really care. I can't remember when I was last so bored by any Bond movie: from the first drab but hysterical chase onwards, there's simply nothing here: no villain or plot worth being scared by, no hero worth caring about, no women who make any real impact, and no settings of true interest.

How bad a director do you have to be to make Siena look drab? And how dim-witted a screenwriter to think that the desert of Bolivia holds any fascination?

The worst part of the movie is Craig himself because he gets so little chance to act, you can't say he's soulful, he's hole-ful. There's no script to speak of, and he has nothing to do outside of some action scenes but glower and gloom. I almost walked out, but kept thinking "It's got to get better." It never did.

Are you kidding?

Instead of being one in 100, she'd be a first among equals in the cabinet, with the clout of her star power adding to the prestige of being in the presidential succession and head of a huge, potentially influential government department. It would give her a world stage.