Tuesday morning roundup

I know that the Grey Lady is busy exposing the misdeeds of New York State governors, for example, but the Times' coffee party coverage represents at least the fourth time, just by my informal count, that the Post has scooped the Times in the past few weeks. Nonetheless, it's a different angle, and an important one. I wonder if the coffee party will co-opt some of the non-fringe tea partiers.

While we're (figuratively) on the topic of hot beverages, I'm going to recommend Safeway's organic mint tea--it's quite good. I also really like Bigelow's Plantation Mint, which comes in decaf should you want to partake in the evening. I don't know what's out in LA, but surely there's a specialty store like Teaism that will have Moroccan Mint, maybe even in decaf.

This guy and his statue figure prominently in the New Yorker piece on Ukraine that I recommended yesterday. And even without that excellent article, the Times' oversimplification is striking:

Nationalists in the west speak Ukrainian and loathe Russian influence. In the east are Russian speakers who feel a kinship toward Moscow. With Mr. Yanukovich’s inauguration, Ukraine has gone from one pole to the other, and the question is whether a Yanukovich presidency can change this dynamic.

It's not East/West, Russian-speaking/Ukrainian speaking, nationalist/pro-Russian. There are threads of those things, but they overlap. If identity politics throughout Eastern Europe are complicated, they're ever more so in Ukraine. The country hasn't gone from one pole to another in an election. People didn't elect Yanukovich because he was pro-Russian; they elected him because the incumbents drove the country into the ground.

Now for another country with an identity crisis and one foot in Europe: Turkey.

The power of infrastructure, strong building codes. And poetry in the face of disaster.

The Rahm debate rages on. The pretext of some of the rumblings quoted in that article annoy me: what about leadership? I can't find it, but the other day Nancy Pelosi pointed out that governance was about more than ensuring reelection. Speaking of Rep. Pelosi, she comes up in Robin Givhan's piece on what the Italians have done for women's power dressing.

Virginia's governor accepts stimulus funds in spite of himself.

Whose benefits would Jesus deny?

Now next time mom yells at me and insists on calling me an idiot, every two minutes, for washing and drying clothes in a hotel room, I'll let her know that Paul Krugman does the same. Actually, his wife has a practical suggestion for more efficient drying.

Verlyn Klinkenborg offers practical suggestions as well (you'll learn how to better adjust your side mirror, which, with my Corolla CE, I have to do manually). More interestingly, he explores the idea that learning is about changing some very fundamental ways--by having bad habits first pointed out to you and then unlearned, and then replaced. This idea has been on my mind since I've started learning a language completely distinct from the ones I know. It's quite challenging to do something mindfully when you've been doing it intuitively for so long, but it's also fascinating.