The Sunday Times: The right’s Mr Moderate goes down with a bad case of measles

Photo: Ryan McGuire

Photo: Ryan McGuire

Both political parties in America have their off-­‐message, loony wings. For my taste, the Republican side has the edge for sheer offensiveness with its claims about “legitimate” rape, equating gay marriage with bestiality and so on. It’s what gives the Republican presidential primaries their destructive feel as the absolute no-­‐hopers are allowed to smash the party’s centre ground with impunity.

Although they are still a year away, campaigning for the Republican primaries has begun in earnest and already we have the first winners and losers. The subject in the ring was the nationwide measles outbreak that started in California and has since spread to 13 other states.

Back in December the yet to be indentified “Patient Zero” went on an outing to Disneyland. Since then the measles virus has crossed the entire country, with more than 100 cases and counting.

On the face of it, measles is not a peculiarly Republican preoccupation. Nevertheless, both Chris Christie, the moderate governor of New Jersey, and Rand Paul, the maverick libertarian senator for Kentucky — two likely Republican contenders in 2016 — weighed in on the issue.

To the surprise of many Republicans — and the glee of the Democratic party — neither would endorse the establishment view that every child in America must be vaccinated.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: From Ancient Greece to the Oscars, Acting Prizes Have Always Meant Drama

Photo: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Photo: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Some kind of controversy always seems to surround the Oscars. If it isn’t outrage beforehand over who was snubbed, it is derision afterward about the embarrassing speeches or the taste-­‐challenged outfits that were paraded down the red carpet.

Yet the “Oscar effect” on nominated movies can be transformative. In 2004, a low-key film about a female boxer had earned just $8.5 million. But after being nominated for best picture, “Million Dollar Baby” enjoyed a spectacular resurgence and raked in additional $56.4 million, according to the website Box Office Mojo.

The enormous financial rewards that the Oscars can bring are a far cry from the more modest prizes given out by their spiritual ancestor, the ancient Greek festival of Dionysus. Most historians agree that the festival was responsible for awarding the first drama prizes in history. The original winner, in the sixth century B.C., is said to have been Thespis, from whom the word “thespian” came. Instead of a golden statuette, Thespis received a live goat.

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The Observer: ‘After The Storm That Wasn’t, New York’s Party Set Felt the Need for More Scotch Read

Photo: Waris Ahluwalia, Uma Thurman, Andrew Karsch and David Schwab at SpeakEasy. (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

Photo: Waris Ahluwalia, Uma Thurman, Andrew Karsch and David Schwab at SpeakEasy. (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

By Benjamin-Emile Le Hay

There was calm after almost-storm Juno. Too much of it, according to city night owls who found the enforced curfew and lack of Ubers infuriating until they were let let loose at House of SpeakEasy’s Gala Wednesday night, sponsored by Aberfeldy and Craigellachie single malt scotches.

“I’m excited to be here!” smiled top guest Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey as he was speedily whirled around the room.

“Sorry!” Uma Thurman chirped, arriving a little late to proceedings, pausing only to pose for a few photos before joining her friend Waris Ahluwalia at her table. By then, patrons were enjoying Simon Doonan recounting an uproarious tale of his audition for the part of Nigel in the Devil Wears Prada. Actor Jim Dale, writer/producer Susan Fales-Hill and political satirist P.J. O’Rourke followed with their own stories on the theme of  “Runnin’ Wild,” or trying not to…

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The Huffington Post: Atwitter With Dan Stevens: House of SpeakEasy

By Regina Weinreich

“Are there any thespians in the house?” asked Simon Doonan at City Winery for the second annual House of SpeakEasy gala on Wednesday night, looking for sympathy. The writer and window dresser long associated with Barney’s (he’s now the store’s creative ambassador at large), had launched into his story about having been tapped for the part of Nigel in the movie of The Devil Wears Prada, a good choice in everyone’s estimation, but he had reservations. “It’s the role of the helpful homosexual,” he quipped, “and I’m not that helpful.” Concluding they were merely picking his brain, “Nigel” did in fact go to a thespian, Stanley Tucci, and yes, there were at least three thespians present in a roomful of writers and other book lovers: Uma Thurman, Jim Dale and Dan Stevens.

Riffing on the theme of Runnin’ Wild, Doonan was one of three featured performers for the event celebrating an organization dedicated to supporting writers, building new literary audiences, and connecting the two in entertaining ways. Another speaker was Susan Fales-Hill, a memoirist and writer for television who began her career as an apprentice on The Cosby Show. A mixed salad of genetic material, she revealed that though she is married for 18 years to the same man, and therefore not wild in the least, she secretly yearns for Downton Abbey’s Mr. Bates. Only Dan Stevens from that cast, a heartthrob to many as the ill-fated Matthew Crawley, attended with his wife Susie Hariet. A sometime writer, known to tweet, he’s editor-at-large of a literary magazine, The Junket.

Humorist P. J. O’Rourke went wild on the subject of baby boomers’ absorption in the self. This entertainment was leavened by Jim Dale’s skillful recitation of familiar quotes from Shakespeare, two of John Dewar and Son’s Last Great Malts, Aberfeldy and Craigellachie single malt whiskies, and a literary quiz masterminded by the evening’s M. C. Amanda Foreman. A mother of five who goes by the name of Bill, Foreman’s latest credit is with BBC2. She will present a show called The World Made by Women, based on a book of the same title that will be published by Random House in 2016.

Thank goodness! The word is alive and well!

The Sunday Times: Read Obama’s lips: he has just skewered President Hillary

Photo: Travel Coffee Book

Photo: Travel Coffee Book

BACK in 1998, Nicole Kidman was playing in the West End, stunning audiences with her naked turn in The Blue Room. It was a performance memorably described by Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph critic, as “pure theatrical Viagra”.

Over in the United States, we were watching our own version of The Blue Room as the sex saga of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky played out almost nightly on our screens. But the only performance that really mattered that year was the night Clinton delivered his State of the Union speech to a Republican-dominated Congress.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The Battle to Include Women

Photo: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES)

Photo: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES)

Since its staid beginnings in 1971 as an annual management symposium at a Swiss ski resort, the World Economic Forum in Davos has grown into the premier talking shop for the global financial elite.

But Huntington’s Davos Man highlights another issue about the forum: It was (and is) overwhelmingly male. This year, some 19% of the 2,500 delegates were women, according to the forum—a number that has barely changed since a (widely ignored) quota system meant to involve more women was imposed by the event’s corporate sponsors in 2011. (Saadia Zahidi, who heads the forum’s gender-parity initiative, said that the gender ratio in Davos reflects “global leadership as a whole” and that the forum is working to increase women’s participation.)

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The Sunday Times: As US racial harmony chokes and gasps, a bigger enemy looks on

Photo: The Independent

Photo: The Independent

New York in the late 1980s and 1990s was a polarised city state, where whites and minority groups lived side by side but in no sense together. They were, to use a phrase coined at the time, “the closest of strangers”.

My arrival in New York in 1987 coincided with the notorious Tawana Brawley case. Tawana was a 15-year-old African-American girl from upstate New York who was abducted and raped by a group of white men. Tawana was subsequently found in a semi-conscious state inside a rubbish bag with racial insults, including “KKK”, “N*****” and “Bitch”, scrawled across her body.

One of her alleged assailants was a local policeman, who committed suicide the week after Tawana was found. Another worked as an assistant district attorney.

Even before Tawana’s ordeal, passions were high in New York because of an incident the previous year in Howard Beach, Queens, in which a black teenager had been killed while trying to escape a white mob. Her assault raised tensions to a whole new level. Howard Beach had been about working-class racial tensions, the kind that New Yorkers were all too familiar with. The Brawley crime implicated the white male establishment.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The “Unbroken Spirit” to Survive

Photo: BETTMANN/CORBIS

Photo: BETTMANN/CORBIS

Louis Zamperini was a U.S. Olympic runner, World War II hero and Japanese prison-­‐camp survivor who went on to become a Christian motivational speaker. The extraordinary suffering and hardship that he endured to come home became the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s best-­‐selling biography “Unbroken” and Angelina Jolie’s recent film of the same title.

One reason why Zamperini resonates with audiences is because his story harks back to classical mythology. The qualities that enabled Zamperini to survive his epic journey—courage, resourcefulness and resilience—were highly prized by the ancient Greeks. A man who displayed them was said to possess arête, broadly defined as moral excellence in the course of fulfilling a specific purpose. For the Greeks, the original Zamperini was Odysseus, whose return to Ithaca after the battle of Troy cost him many arduous trials and lasted 10 years.

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The Sunday Times: Modern authoritarians aren’t out to kill freedom, merely cripple it

In 1984 the French intellectual, Jean-François Revel, now deceased, published How Democracies Perish, in which he predicted: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before

Photo: Jean-Frederic Fortier

Photo: Jean-Frederic Fortier

our eyes.”

Less than a decade later, spurred by the fall of the Berlin Wall, he appeared to take the opposite view in Democracy Against Itself, claiming: “Democracy is not only conceivable, it is inevitable. It has been indispensable, but until now it was not inevitable.”

Not surprisingly, Revel, a staunch supporter of America’s battle against the Soviet Union, was ridiculed by critics for his inconsistency.

I didn’t give much thought to Revel after that; at least, not until this year when I began my trek across the world on behalf of the BBC. Then I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I began to see for myself what life is like when there is no such thing as a Bill of Rights, or separation between church and state, or between state and party.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: The Glory Days of Frankincense and Myrrh

Photo: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

Photo: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

The Magi, the three wise men, famously offered the baby Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. We can still understand why they brought gold, but what Mary and Joseph were meant to do with the frankincense and myrrh—resins derived from the Boswellia and Commiphora trees—has become less obvious.

The usual explanation for the Magi’s gifts is that they symbolized the trajectory of Jesus’ life: gold to announce his divine origins and kingship, frankincense (which was burned in religious ceremonies) to declare his future role as a priest, and myrrh (which was used in burials) to represent his suffering and death.

But to the ancients, the significance of frankincense and myrrh went far beyond their spiritual symbolism. Both commodities had played a central role in daily life since the dawn of civilization. The resins were introduced to Egypt in the third millennium B.C. from the Land of Punt (thought to have been somewhere between Ethiopia and Eritrea).

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