My handwriting is execrable. I routinely desecrate the elegant, engraved stationery that my husband gave me as a birthday present with cramped, misshapen, and only partly legible scrawls. This despite the years I spent in parochial school being drilled by the nuns in the Palmer method, the loopy but highly readable cursive hand developed by Austin Norman Palmer during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Not long ago, New York City stopped a Walmart store from being built in its downtrodden East New York neighborhood, another defeat in the giant discounter/grocer’s six-year effort to enter the five boroughs. Small retailers and unions, in prevailing, embraced a century-old tradition of political suppression of retail competition. Notwithstanding the loud American romance with entrepreneurship, Marc Levinson’s history of the erstwhile supermarket giant A&P—the Walmart of its day—rewrites the story.

In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, a book that included, among its other peculiarities, a complaint that Victorian society was destroying eccentricity, and thereby individuality, and thereby freedom. 

Reuters appears to have prematurely published George Soros's obituary:

Republicans should remember: Tax cuts aren't everything.

That Gitmo prisoner in the New York Times is a bad dude.

Pictures of the protests in Caracas.

The latest round of Pulitzer Prizes is set to be announced this afternoon, and two things can be said about the eventual winners: Some recipents will be more deserving than others, and there will be an excess of self-congratulation. So this is as good a time as any to point you toward WEEKLY STANDARD editor Philip Terzian's pithy and blunt summation of what's wrong with the Pulitzer Prizes from 2007. Terzian's own experience suggests he's well worth reading on the subject—he's been a finalist for the prestigious award and served on the Pulitzer jury:

Our pieces on Margaret Thatcher in this week's issue elicited many responses. Among the most eloquent and powerful was this email to the boss from a senior Hill staffer who deals with GOP members on national security issues, written, the staffer says, with "spontaneous passion while I was walking to meet a friend for lunch Saturday." It's reproduced here with the staffer's permission.

The world of golf (an admittedly precious domain) held its breath Friday night and Saturday morning, waiting to learn if Tiger Woods would be disqualified at the Masters for a rules violation.

When the four-month-long National Hockey League (NHL) lockout was resolved this past winter, a collective sigh of relief could be heard—especially in Canada, where ice hockey is viewed as a national pastime that defines a way of life. Hockey stories, legends, and heroes are passed down in an effort to preserve the history and frozen mystique of “our game.”  

This is the latest in the “edible series” of books put out by Reaktion Books, each of which explores the history and cultural associations of a particular food or drink. Written by Lorna Piatti-Farnell of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, Beef is number 33 in the series, its predecessors including Apple, Caviar, Chocolate, Lobster, and Rum. 

Trance has to be judged one of the great disappointments in recent cinema, given that it is only the second movie Danny Boyle has made since Slumdog Millionaire. That Oscar-winning worldwide smash may have been the best film of the past decade.

Nick Turse wants us to know that the killing of civilians during the war in Vietnam was “widespread, routine, and directly attributable to U.S. command policies,” that “gang rapes were a .  .  . common occurrence,” that the running-over of civilians by American vehicle drivers was “commonplace,” and that the American military visited upon South Vietnam an “endless slaughter .  .  . day after day, month after month .  .  .