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[Whoops--thought I'd posted this already.]

The Sunday Times led with a classic "human story with symbolic significance" piece of journalism, about an Israeli soldier with a Palestinian father. Here's the closer: "When he saw him here for the first time in several months recently, he shook with sobs: a burly Israeli sergeant in olive fatigues, a star of David on the chain around his neck, clutching his Palestinian father on a Dimona sidewalk, not letting go, defying his state, defying, it seemed, the centrifugal conflict itself." A good article if you like that sort of thing.

Rich colleges get more federal aid than poor colleges. I don't know what to think about this. Also, half of the Education Life section this week was about tuition.

Hispanics reject racial categories. On the U.S. Census form, which lists "Hispanic" as an ethnicity and then asks correspondents to select one of five races, 42% of Hispanics choose "some other race"--a response that almost no non-Hispanics choose. Lots of interesting stuff about trends in how people define race.

Remember how the feds rounded up a bunch of illegal immigrants working as janitors at Wal-Mart? Now the immigrants are suing Wal-Mart for "failing to pay overtime, withhold taxes and make required workers' compensation contributions." So weird.

station to station for the magazine

I don't often post stuff from the Times Magazine, because, to cut a long story short, I don't usually read it before the wall of pay goes up. But this week was the annual Oscar-season movie issue, so, well, here it is.

The effort to restore dignity, or at least audience share, to the Oscars. The year-end rush of too many prestige films. And the competition for release dates. This article notes that studios are countering The Return of the King with films "targeted primarily at a female audience. Women, so the thinking goes, are less inclined to want to spend three-plus hours watching hobbits and orcs march around Middle Earth." I guess, but it seems like the most enthusiastic LOTR movie fans I've known are women. Also, here's another article about the making of the series, from the business side.

Pictures from the Venice International Film Festival. And a nice "What They Were Thinking" shot from the set of One From the Heart twenty years ago.

Steven Spielberg is underrated. Mark Ruffalo and Jude Law are sexy. Cate Blanchett is uninterested in celebrity. Ice Cube doesn't like the music business or the movie business. ("They're both bad. It's like comparing two glasses of dirty water. One of them is going to taste better than the other.") And Tim Burton, described by some as a visual genius who can't tell a story, has made his most narrative film.

Nancy Meyers on screenwriting without her ex-husband and former collaborator. And my favorite piece in the issue, Quentin Tarantino and Brian Helgeland talking about screenwriting.

Helgeland: It's a very complicated thing, adaptation. And it's a very different kind of satisfaction than you get from doing an original. It's easier, sort of, but also trickier. If you write an original, it's like you went in and dug a well and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it's like the oil well's on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again -- or something like that.

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I'm reading another fantastical novel with a contemporary, real-world-ish setting, by another Minnesota writer--Emma Bull's War for the Oaks. Given various predilections, and the book's general reputation, it's surprising I haven't made it to this one before. I suspect it was because I opened it up and saw printed lyrics.

In any case, I'm bringing it up just as an excuse to post another photo. Here's the opening paragraph:

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of office towers and department stores. The big red-and-white city buses roar at every corner. On the many-globed lampposts, banners advertising a museum exhibit flap in the wind that the tallest buildings snatch out of the sky. The skyway system vaults the mall with its covered bridges of steel and glass, and they, too, are full of people, color, motion.

And here's my photograph of the Nicollet Mall:

Some things are just better in prose.