In today's gig economy, where jobs have been replaced by 'portfolios of projects,' most people find themselves doing more things less well for two-thirds of the money.
Tina Brown
No one has put in harder training to become a royal bride than the glossy-haired Kate Middleton.
Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.
For Sarah Palin, the least experienced on the world stage, the stress of maintaining the fiction that she was qualified to be vice president sent her over the deep end almost immediately. She went off on a ferocious spending spree that might have killed a lesser woman. Katie Couric's straightforward questions unraveled her.
Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.
Perhaps it's time to stop analyzing Sarah Palin as a politician. Maybe, in her own muddled way, she is at last owning up to the fact that she has been miscast. You don't need politics anymore once you've discovered that the alchemy of celebrity has turned you into a 24-carat phenomenon.
Editorial outfits are now advertising agencies.
The question for Obama is how he can rein in the furies of populism while making us all feel the malefactors of great wealth are being sufficiently punished.
Captain Richard Phillips of the good ship Maersk Alabama - and Sully Sullenberger splashing down his crippled airliner in the Hudson River - broke through the poisonous smog of economic depression and Wall Street skullduggery with a reminder that pure individual heroism is a daily occurrence if we know where to look for it.
The cloud that descended on Black Rock on Monday was not for the past but the future. How much will this debacle chill the pursuit of other risky investigations?
I think British journalists do well in America because the newspaper culture there is so strong - telling stories and presenting them readably is in their DNA. British newspapers get a terrible rap, but they are brilliant in their presentation, most of them, so full of vitality and literary wit.
Who was Amanda Knox? Was she a fresh-faced honor student from Seattle who met anyone's definition of an all-American girl - attractive, athletic, smart, hard-working, adventuresome, in love with languages and travel? Or was her pretty face a mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul?
Schwarzenegger is big, he's noisy, he's larger than life, and he's earned the credibility to be cast for the role of America's Green superhero.
Oprah's stock in trade has always been her powerful unmediated connection. She could feel your pain and empower you to talk about it.
Give Obama a script he has made his own, and he is the motivational speaker to end all speakers. Tony Robbins cloned with Honest Abe.
CBS's Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies.
It's as if inside the White House the belief in Obama's inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it's a startling revelation.
The vaults of Buckingham palace are groaning with priceless, useless freebies from foreign dignitaries.
Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.
American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long, a whole generation gave up on them.
No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.
I haven't spent years, like Alyse Nelson of Vital Voices, toiling for female economic empowerment on five continents.
Disinterested public service has become, just so... what's the phrase, 'old school.'
Unlike his predecessors, Obama is not big on 'Masterpiece Theatre' nostalgia.
One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is 'Out of the Box.' The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn't.
Celebrity these days is completely for sale; it's not remotely mysterious. But there's something that remains glamorous and mysterious about royalty.
There are a multitude of mothers in the world who have a daughter who is stolen, or who are stolen daughters themselves.
It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama's meager resume - 'a mere community organizer!' - before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama's experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.
For a guy who believes in hope, Obama doesn't seem to be able to spread much of it around. How can he? We know too much now about the hollowness of institutions and the frailty of their leaders.
It's one of the biggest fibs going that American newspapers are now being forced to give up their commitment to investigative reporting. Most of them gave up long ago as their greedy managements squeezed every cent out of the bottom line and turned their newsrooms into eunuchs.
There is nothing radical about Obama except the fact of who he is.
It's interesting how the view from abroad can shift and remake perceptions of homegrown celebrities, the ones who are part of the gross domestic product.
Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.
Obama has figured out the best method to prepare the way for his verbal Houdini acts: Use political noise as the tune-up din before the aria. Perhaps his body temperature is so low, it sometimes takes him too long to break out the song.
There is nobody more boring than the undefeated.
The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.
Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.
The hazard of confessional books is how fast the world moves on while they're written.
Where did the inspiring Obama of the campaign go, that Facebook pied piper who friended the whole world with this update: 'Change you can believe in.' What happened to him?
What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity.
Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games.
Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d'Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.
The first black president was a hotter plot line than the first woman president.
An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.
In TV, you always feel you are standing on the tracks of an oncoming train.
When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night's sleep.
When Obama heralds another 'teachable moment,' it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.
The British Isles are awash with the choice of beautiful historic churches, abbeys, and cathedrals where one king or another has tied the knot and bestowed a royal precedent.
After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be 'Just Like Us?' 'Just Like Us' means just as boring as we are.
Obama can't change his cool disposition, though it would be nice if he lost the vaguely grudging air he gives off that problems of management get in the way of ideas.
