Minnesota

The 1994 midterm election is justly recalled as the strongest ever for the Republican Party. Bill Clinton, elected to the presidency two years earlier, had spent the first half of his term giving voters reason to regret the faith they’d placed in him. Independents felt let down, Republicans were openly hostile (and unusually unified in their opposition to him) and Democrats were just underwhelmed. On Election Day, the G.O.P. won just about everything there was to win – with one glaring exception.

That would be in Virginia, a state where – on paper – the G.O.P. had no excuse for losing that year’s Senate race.  read more »

According to one prominent experty on corporate governance, Barack Obama's campaign was wise to accept the resignation of James Johnson, but the selection of Johnson to lead Obama's vice presidential selection committee in the first place remains a baffling one.

"It's a judgment issue," said Charles Elson, head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "Why would you pick him to begin with? I knew about him. I knew his history. And if it suddenly came to my mind, why wouldn't it come to [Obama's]?"

Johnson headed the compensation committee at the Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group, which awarded more than $1.4 billion in stock options to its chief executive before he was forced to return nearly $620 million of that money as a result of a settlement with federal regulators and shareholders. That case, among others, led Obama to introduce legislation in the Senate to give shareholders a greater say on the compensation packages of departing C.E.O.s. Obama's leading role on that legislation was what made Johnson's selection so jarring.  read more »

There's a new king in town, but he lives in Minnesota: "Deuce Seven... came to the East Coast for the first time on January 10, arriving with a backpack of spray cans he'd stolen from a Minnesota Home Depot, some painted boards, and an open invitation to sleep on a Brooklyn couch. The lanky 21-year-old spent three and a half weeks... painting New York. Then he went home."

[Voice]

This weather sucks. But, always look on the bright side of life, eh? The Shake Shack in Madison Square Park reopens in less than five days.

[Eater]

Apparently, there's a Communist Party headquarters in Chelsea, and it's embracing real-estate. What does this mean for Communism? More importantly, what does this mean for irony?

[BlogChelsea via Curbed]

Finally, though The Real Estate has barely a drop of Irish blood (hell, one of us is of English descent and another celebrates Columbus Day), we would like you to know: McSorley's opens at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Happy St. Patrick's Day!

- Tom Acitelli

Last Wednesday morning, the actor Ned Beatty gently moved aside a woman’s purse to sit down on a c  read more »

Last Wednesday morning, the actor Ned Beatty gently moved aside a woman’s purse to sit down on  read more »

Last Wednesday morning, the actor Ned Beatty gently moved aside a woman’s purse to sit down on  read more »

Last Wednesday morning, the actor Ned Beatty gently moved aside a woman’s purse to sit down on a c  read more »

Something's wrong with the baseball standings in the papers and online.

No one's interested in reading the classic divisional standings; we know who won now, only two out of six races are in play, Detroit vs Minnesota in the AL Central, and LA vs San Diego in the NL West. Baseball fans are interested in the Wild Card standings, but when you click on these, you see Minnesota way ahead of Chicago in the AL and Philly edging ahead of LA in the NL. These are false standings; they leave out San Diego and Detroit, which are actually in contention for the Wild Card.

Someone should come up with a better way of presenting the standings, as an Expanded Wild Card, where a division leader is included with an asterisk, or it says: Top Two Finishers Go Through to Playoffs. As it is, the papers are just wasting space.

The jabbering, meandering and ossified movie that Robert Altman has made from Garrison Keillor&rsquo  read more »

LAURIE: Our wedding guests will be driving or flying in to Central New York from New York City, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Germany, possibly Israel, possibly Indonesia, possibly England. I will need to put together a list of suggested amusements and attractions to occupy my guests' downtime between Friday's "rehearsal dinner" picnic, Saturday's ceremony and reception, and Sunday's bagel brunch. This means that I need to change my attitude about the place where I grew up. I need to stop saying, "It's pretty, but there's no culture, and nothing to do." I was bored senseless as a teenager, but I didn't have a car.

There are a lot of things I've never done and seen in the area. There's an art park, a historical society, a lake and a yacht club in fancy-pants Cazenovia. I've passed the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, literally hundreds of times and never been inside. Sylvan Beach, on Oneida Lake, is the small-time, freshwater version of the Jersey Shore, complete with deathtrap carnival rides, scary bikers and fried everything.

Chittenango, the actual town in which I grew up and went to high school, is the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz. Downtown Chittenango, such as it is, has yellow brick sidewalks, several Oz-themed businesses, and a small Oz museum; every June there is an Oz Parade, at which a handful of surviving Munchkins make trembly appearances. The whole Oz thing was miles beneath my contempt as a teenager, before I knew the value (or, to be honest, the definition) of kitsch .

There are dozens of golf courses in the area, three separate Erie Canal museums, a salt museum, the museum of freaking distance running, places where you can pick your own berries, state parks for hiking and swimming, ice cream stands and family-run dairy farms.  read more »

Something for everyone, if I can just keep myself from apologizing for the lameness of it all.

When asked why I got my brand-new tattoo, I like to say that New York made me do it.  read more »

When asked why I got my brand-new tattoo, I like to say that New York made me do it.  read more »

Mauro of Manhattan

“So, our champagne shower?”  read more »

Mauro of Manhattan   “So, our champagne shower?”    read more »

Last Friday night, the comedian Al Franken went on The Late Show with David Letterman and said somet  read more »

When the haze of sentimentality dissipates, and the people who always mocked or ignored Paul Wellsto  read more »

I'm at a dinner party in Sag Harbor.The puckish, balding man with an electric grin-slightly wild, sl  read more »

As most of the reading world knows by now, I have a daughterwho is living with AIDS.  read more »

A few weeks ago my father said, "I've got a terrific idea for your next article.""Great," I replied,  read more »

Thomas Wolfe was right. You can't go home again.  read more »