Daily Office: Tuesday
¶ Matins: Frank Rich congratulates the makers of Up in the Air for showing us how broken our economy is.
If there was ever a market that won’t fix itself, it’s our job market. Good folk are being thrown out of work by heedless millionaires. (NYT)
¶ Lauds: We’ll be celebrating the bicentennial of Frédéric Chopin next year. This composer of so much dreamy music wasn’t, himself, very dreamy at all. Come to think of it, his music isn’t, either. Jessica Duchen, in the Independent, conjures a portrait of the composer as Hugh Grant, way back in 1991, in James Lapine’s Impromptu. (via MetaFilter)
¶ Prime: Chris Lehmann at The Awl and Felix Salmon agree: the financial press were perhaps the last people in the world entitled to attack Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs & al. Indeed, we are tempted to conclude that the Megan McArdles and the Heidi Moore’s were more or less obliged to attack Mr Taibbi, simply in order to protect their Rolodexes.
¶ Tierce: Jim Dwyer observes that our health- and environmental-conscious mayor does not practice what he preaches.
We would never scold anyone for flying on a private plane. Only a martyr would fly commercial if offered the choice. The better alternative is not to fly at all. A man as wealthy as Michael Bloomberg does not have to be anywhere in a hurry. He can sail. (NYT)
¶ Sext: We didn’t know who James Chartrand was, but now we wonder what to call her. (Copyblogger; via The AwlJ
¶ Nones: Juan Cole connects a few dots, between Iraqi oil, the Shi’ite control of Baghdad, and Teheran. Throw in Lebanon while you’re at it! (via LRB)
(While we’re mentioning LRB in passing, we want to note that we disagree with John Perry about Washington’s response to the Honduran coup. We sincerely doubt that any informed Latin Americans want the United States to restore Manuel Zelaya, whether by force or diplomatic blackmail.)
¶ Vespers: Richard Crary has been writing up a storm at The Existence Machine, about feminism, socialism, and, here, a long post about Flannery O’Connor, whom he has just gotten round to reading.
¶ Compline: Scott Sayare’s piece on the unpopularity of the Internet among French politicos makes for a fun read. As Tocqueville pointed out a while back, the French Revolution left a number of institutions intact. (NYT)