drupaul

The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.

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A daily video from SlateV.

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What? You've been giving away your urine for free?

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The art of painting softly.

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An interactive feature from Slate.

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The Washington Post leads with the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations agreeing on a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It marked the first time that President Bush has backed a plan that calls for a specific target to combat global warming. The declaration made it clear that developing nations must also commit to "meaningful" cuts, which has long been a goal of the Bush administration. Developing countries and environmentalists were quick to criticize the Group of Eight declaration as essentially meaningless because its language was too vague. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with, and the WP fronts, claims by a former Environmental Protection Agency official that Vice President Cheney's office sought deletions to a federal official's prepared testimony about health threats posed by global warming.

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Even kf is not this paranoid. ... 2:35 P.M.

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The Federal Reserve will issue new lending rules to "restrict exotic mortgages" for people with poor credit ratings, according to a report in Tuesday's New York Times. What's so exotic about an exotic mortgage?

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Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.—Rudyard Kipling

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Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth today formally introduced the newspaper's new editor, Wall Street Journal veteran Marcus Brauchli. Even among fellow journalists there's been some question about how to pronounce Brauchli's surname—many seemed to think it was a homonym for a certain green vegetable. Not so!

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One hundred years ago, L.M. Montgomery did for women's imaginative lives what Susan B. Anthony did for women's political lives by publishing Anne of Green Gables, the story of an outspoken red-haired orphan growing up on Canada's Prince Edward Island. The book immediately broke through commercially and artistically, selling some 19,000 copies in five months, leading even the cranky dean of American letters, Mark Twain, to pronounce Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." Today, Anne of Green Gables and its seven sequels are the basis for a small industry. More than 50 million editions of the first volume are in print around the world. The books have spun off movies, musicals, miniseries, and an assortment of bric-a-brac, from tea sets to light switches. But perhaps the greatest tribute to Anne's enduring vitality is the decision by the solemn eminences who edit the Modern Library to issue and heavily promote a centennial edition of the first volume in the series. Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, meet L.M. Montgomery and Anne Shirley.

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Pixar's post-apocalyptic love story Wall-E finished No. 2 at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend after hauling in $65 million the weekend before. The film depicts a future Earth abandoned by humans, blanketed in garbage, and nearly devoid of life. At the outset, Wall-E, a robot, has but one companion: a friendly cockroach. How did we come to believe that cockroaches will outlive everything else on Earth?

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A daily video from SlateV.

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New York, July 14The cover essay by Tom Wolfe recounts how Clay Felker—who died last week—corralled the New Journalism trailblazers of the 1960s to chronicle an exuberant New York in magazines. "His Show me! instincts led him directly … toward styles of life that made big news." Wolfe rattles off the incendiary stories shepherded by New York's founding editor: Gail Sheehy on prostitution, Jimmy Breslin on "the first Bad Boy professional athlete" Joe Namath, Nik Cohn's feature that served as the basis for Saturday Night Fever, Wolfe's own profile of then-New Yorker editor William Shawn (which created a media stir and made it known that there were now two big-time New York magazines), Barbara Goldsmith and Diane Arbus' collaborative feature on Andy Warhol's Factory girls that nearly sunk the magazine. "He had a way of convincing you that his dream was as good as action accompli," Wolfe remembers. … Friends, colleagues, and acquaintances testify to how Felker "remade American journalism." No one was better at covering New York's "local pageant of ambition, the yearning and hustling and jostling of power [and] status," Kurt Andersen writes.

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Sir John M. Templeton, the renowned investor and spiritually guided philanthropist, died Tuesday at the age of 95. In a 1997 "Assessment," David Plotz called Sir Templeton "the defining philanthropist of our time." The piece is reprinted below.

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The latest addition to Slate's dictionary of Obamaisms.

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Why fireworks are safer than the Supreme Court.

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I'm shopping for a car, and my tree-hugging pals are pushing me to get a Prius. But it seems wasteful to buy a brand-new car, given all the energy that goes into the production process. Wouldn't it be greener to get a certified, pre-owned vehicle with decent gas mileage?

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A weekly poem, read by the author.

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USA Today and the Washington Post lead with Iraq's prime minister suggesting for the first time that he would favor establishing some sort of timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. During a visit to the United Arab Emirates, Nouri al-Maliki talked about the security pact currently being negotiated between the United States and Iraq, and said it looks like the two sides will "reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a timetable on their withdrawal." The White House publicly said the statement was consistent with U.S. policy but the Bush administration has frequently spoken up against a timeline for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

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