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"The picture in my stolen [passport] wasn’t half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person’s face drawn on it… This was the new me, post-theft— all my youthful optimism gone, filched by some drug addict in Hawaii."
— In this week’s issue, David Sedaris reflects on the time his passport was stolen while on vacation, and the bureaucratic troubles that ensued (subscription required): http://nyr.kr/ZfFFmb(Source: newyorker.com)
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Are köttbullar the hot dogs of meatballs? Lauren Collins on the “Horsemeat Scandal,” now at IKEA: http://nyr.kr/YTzLHZ
Photograph: Jessica Gow/AFP/Getty.
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"Perhaps I am naïve to be even a little bit surprised that Cameron would try to salvage such a blatantly self-serving system."
— John Cassidy on Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of Lord Leveson’s call for stricter regulation of Britain’s press: http://nyr.kr/X5yMs6(Source: newyorker.com)
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Obama Gets Foreign Policy Scolding from Man Who Almost Started War with Britain→
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—President Barack Obama received a stern lecture on foreign policy today from a man who almost started a war with Great Britain in July: http://nyr.kr/QTOP7U
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Lauren Collins on Prince Harry and press freedom in Britain: http://nyr.kr/TZKr7x
I was going to spare you all any mention of Prince Harry. But today His Highness’s adventures in Vegas became political, as the Sun, in likely contravention of the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, which forbids “intrusions into an individual’s private life,” and in definite contravention of the royal family’s wishes, as articulated by the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, published a set of pictures that, as everyone knows by now, show a naked Prince Harry cuddling a female companion while watching television and cupping his genitals…
Photograph by Rex Features/AP Images.
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Olympic Sailing in the Town that George III Built→
Rebecca Mead on Weymouth, Dorset, where the first two weeks of Olympic sailing events will take place: http://nyr.kr/PHH43O
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"If there was a medal for diplomacy, Romney would already have been eliminated from the competition."
— John Cassidy on Mitt Romney and David Cameron’s clash over the Olympics: http://nyr.kr/QLf69D -
James Wood found himself “left cold by all the excitement around Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee,” but one activity did warm his spirit: http://nyr.kr/Kyi5AI
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The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.
- In this week’s issue, Lauren Collins writes about how the Daily Mail conquered England: http://nyr.kr/GQqWLE -
This week in the magazine, Lauren Collins writes about the “Big Society,” the plan by the new Conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, to revitalize the United Kingdom even as it must make massive budget cuts. Here Collins talks with Blake Eskin about how Britons are reacting to the idea of pitching in as the government is doing less, and how interviewing British politicians differs from interviewing their American counterparts.
