Headlines from May 23, 2012
- Irony in Zimbabwe’s gradual improvement: Mugabe is necessary for now.
- Senior GOPers increasingly bullish about Romney, whom they winced over during the primaries.
- Analysis finds most members of Congress speak like high school sophomores.
- Egypt’s election matters because “its winner will assume a crucial role” in far broader struggles to come. #opinions
- Soon to come: Twilight, the religion.
- “Kardashian” as unit: the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day.
- If Hirst did not try to paint an orange accurately, no one would know he can’t do it. Savage takedown of new Hirst show.
- Woman who pled guilty to manslaughter believed by activists to have been “on trial for surviving a hate crime.”
- Story of the 1965 effort, visiting more than a thousand towns, to record America’s “other language.”
- Incredibly detailed inside-baseball account of 30 Rock‘s production.
- Musings on the internet’s effects on the ultra-Orthodox.
- Arachnophobia—fear of spiders—cured with two-hour treatment.
- Tokyo transsexual cooks and serves his own genitals at public “Ham Cybele” banquet.
- Teddy Wayne and TMN’s Rosecrans Baldwin talk about Mexican food in Paris, France.
- See also: Mexican food reviewed in Paris, Texas.
- Spirits professional offers advice on how to find good food in American bars.
- Tips on how to look better in photographs.
- Poem for your Wednesday afternoon: “Spring Reign” by Dean Young.
- Syria proves countries with strong middle classes and diverse economies are worse at overthrowing dictators than those without.
- Obama’s spending binge never happened—federal spending is rising at its slowest pace since the end of the Korean War.
- Author of the book on Romney’s nightstand says the candidate missed the point of one of his passages.
- Researchers find a third of malaria drugs used worldwide are fake.
- The chicken: genomed animal, friend of Roman armies, ubiquitous food of our era.
- Dismayed by her school’s unhealthy lunches, nine-year-old starts a blog that shames the school into making changes.
- Supreme Court decides in-vitro children may not be due Social Security benefits, should their father die before they’re born.
- Breast cancer epidemic among male Marines tied to contaminated water—and could hold the key to a cure. #longreads
- Intrigued by the Unabomber’s ideas on tech, a professor becomes his pen pal and friend.
- Tickets to visit world’s tallest tower, now found in Tokyo, sold out through July.