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Paperback Writers: An Archive of Past Reviews
June 5, 2011
Paperback writers: Classic Le Carré
First published in 1974, John le Carré's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (Penguin: 400 pp., $16) deals with the quest to ferret out a double agent within the highest levels of the British secret service. The novel's plot weaves together a backward-looking investigation, drawing in the testimony of witnesses, case files and detailed memories, while moving swiftly forward toward danger, pursuit, entrapment and resolution.
April 30, 2011
Paperback Writers: Sunlight and shadow in 'Los Angeles in the 1930s'
Created by FDR in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (a small part of the wider Works Progress Administration) was a make-work agency that gave jobs to about 6,500 writers, editors and researchers before closing shop in 1943. The government, in other words, used taxpayers' money to pay small but welcome salaries to writers. Go figure.
March 6, 2011
Paperback writers: Two survivor stories
Many memoirs, and some of the best, are survival stories, tales told by that supposedly fortunate person who emerged living but not unscarred from the carnage of natural disaster or personal tragedy. Survival comes with a price tag: Not only must the survivor move forward, but he or she must assess his or her position vis-à-vis what occurred. That is what Brooke Hayward does in her classic memoir "Haywire" (Vintage: 329 pp., $16 paper), now reissued more than 30 years after its original publication, with an introduction by Buck Henry and a new afterword by the author.
January 2, 2011
Paperback Writers: Between sea and sky
Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS in late 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London on the day that Ayatollah Khomeini handed a death sentence to Chatwin's friend Salman Rushdie, was a legendary event, mobbed by fans, celebrities and hundreds of journalists. Chatwin was by then a cult — admired as much for his self-mythologizing persona and the values of independent scholarship and lonely questing that he seemed to represent as for his clipped, lapidary prose. With Chatwin, everything had to be the best: the writing, the conversation, the trip, the clothes, the Mont Blanc pens, the Aspreys ink, the notebooks that were only available from certain little Paris papeterie.
November 21, 2010
Paperback Writers: James Boswell's 'London Journal 1762-1763'; Michael J. Arlen's 'Exiles' [Updated]
The handwritten pages of James Boswell's " London Journal 1762-1763" languished forgotten in a trunk in Scotland before being brought to light in the middle of the last century and issued under the auspices of Yale University. This event, together with publication of successive hordes of newly discovered Boswell material, at last separated him from Dr. Samuel Johnson, in whose large and overbearing shadow he had lingered after writing his biography, and established him as a personality in his own right. The "London Journal," now available in an unexpurgated new edition (Penguin Classics: $17 paper) is vivid, intimate, compelling and seemingly off-the-cuff, yet carefully wrought.
10:14 PM EDT, September 30, 2010
Paperback Writers: Deep into mysteries of Hammett and Hemingway
Black Mask, the great pulp fiction magazine, was launched by H.L. Mencken in 1920 but really started to come into its own some six or seven years later under the editorship of Joseph T. Shaw, who would in time publish almost the entire pantheon of classic hardboiled American crime writers: Raymond Chandler, Horace McCoy, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Lester Dent, Fredric Brown, Cornell Woolrich and so on. The list goes on and on. But Shaw's main man, his ace performer, the writer whose career he helped launched into the stratosphere — and whose lean, mean bullet narratives furnished Black Mask with its identity — was Dashiell Hammett. It's fitting, then, that although Otto Penzler's whopping new anthology, "The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories" (Vintage: $25), features all of the above authors, and many more, its thrilling centerpiece is Hammett's greatest book, "The Maltese Falcon." Here it is published in its entirety, not in its final book form but as it first appeared in serial form in the pulpy pages of the magazine.
August 29, 2010
Paperback Writers: Vintage early Mantel
It may seem, thanks to her ManBooker Prize winning novel 'Wolf Hall' (just out in paperback, Picador: 608 pp., $16), that the novelist Hilary Mantel needs no more attention; but in fact the large body of her work — and she's been publishing for more than 25 years — remains largely unknown, and unread, in this country. "Wolf Hall" inhabits the life of Thomas Cromwell, the man who wrote and rammed through the laws that created the English Reformation, enabling Henry VIII to ditch his first wife and marry Anne Boleyn. It's a story we think we know, thanks to scores of movies and TV shows, but in "Wolf Hall" Mantel makes it new, marrying our fascination with the ruthless glamour of Tudor England to her most mesmerizing fictional gift, the ability to get under the skins and into the heads of her characters, so that even seeming monsters become vivid, present, comprehensible, and we start to love them after all.
July 25, 2010
Paperback Writers: Henry Miller's Grecian days
In 1939, with Europe already sinking into World War II, 46-year-old Henry Miller left Paris, knowing that a cycle of his life had come to an end. As an expatriate in Paris he'd found his voice, and published the novels — "Tropic of Cancer," "Black Spring" and "Tropic of Capricorn" — which made his name. He'd had his legendarily steamy and dangerous affair with Anais Nin, and George Orwell had fired a salute on his behalf, hailing him as "a Whitman among the corpses."
May 23, 2010
Paperback Writers: What made Dylan roar?
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in New York on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. Already a celebrity, Thomas was turned into a legend.
April 25, 2010
Paperback Writers: Boston, down and dirty
Forty years ago, in 1970, the young George V. Higgins was working as a federal prosecutor in Boston. By then he'd graduated from Boston College, done a creative writing course at Stanford and worked as a newspaperman before going back to school to study law. He'd written a string of unpublished books and his latest, "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" (Picador: 182 pp., $14 paper), had already been rejected many times. But Alfred A. Knopf decided to take a chance, offering Higgins the not-so-princely sum of $2,000 for the novel. Higgins took all his failed manuscripts and burned them; as Dennis Lehane notes in his introduction to a new edition of Higgins' breakthrough book, the game of the crime story was about to change forever.
March 28, 2010
Paperback Writers: Nightmare noir
William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (NYRB Classics: 288 pp., $16) tells the rise-and-fall story of Stan Carlisle, a hustling carnival wanna-be who transforms himself into the Great Stanton, a big-time stage magician, and then into a fake psychic, running a "spook racket" before reaching too far and engineering his own catastrophe.
February 28, 2010
Paperback Writers: Sillitoe's still running
Alan Sillitoe, now in his 80s, grew up in Nottingham, in the English midlands, in the kind of squalor and poverty that, a century earlier, gave Charles Dickens nightmares. Sillitoe's father was a violent drunk; his mother, on occasion, was forced to prostitute herself. The family, constantly fighting to stay one step ahead of debt and rent collectors, was often on the move, dodging from one squalid tenement to the next, wheeling their belongings in a hand-cart. An abiding memory of his childhood, Sillitoe has written, was of his father raising his fist and his mother pleading: "Not in the face."
January 3, 2010
Tuning back in to 'White Noise'
Don DeLillo's "White Noise" (Penguin: 336 pp., $16 paper), newly reissued in a 25th anniversary edition with superb jacket art by Michael Cho, is many different types of novel: a campus novel; the soap opera of a hilariously dysfunctional family; a disaster story; a murder story; a meditation on America's nervousness around (and obsession with) fear and dying; and a satire on trashy cultural values that is nonetheless filled with heart-stopping, and realistically rendered, moments of human radiance and recognition.
December 13, 2009
Welcome to Hecht's Windy City
Ben Hecht used Oscars for doorstops and routinely heaped scorn on the studio pontiffs who, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, paid him an average of $3,500 a day. Before he co-wrote "The Front Page," the play that brought him fame and opportunity, before he laid the story foundations of two basic movie genres (the gangster film and the screwball comedy), before he called into being the myth of the Hollywood screenwriter (overpaid yet endlessly put-upon), Hecht was a reporter, a newspaper man in America's hottest crime city during American journalism's golden age.
December 6, 2009
The year's best paperback reissues
In "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" (Verso: 158 pp., $12.95), the philosopher and cultural-theorist Slavoj Zizek uses his razzle-dazzle postmodern intellect to probe the economic catastrophe of 2008. Capitalism is an ideology, Zizek argues, and the notion of a global free market was as utopian, and as potentially delusional, as communism. His critique pursues this idea through the ironies of the collapse and the bailout. One of his points is that Alan Greenspan overestimated the rationality of free market agents and forgot to consider a quite reasonable expectation that the speculators held, namely that "the risks would be worth taking, since, in the event of a financial collapse, they could count on the state to cover their loss." In other words, in the United States, only bankers can rely on socialism, and the elite will always do a good job of protecting itself. Zizek doesn't let the left off the hook either, showing how the inability to present a fiscal alternative permitted Wall Street to regroup and present the bailout as a favor that was being done for us all. Zizek, a Marxist, writes with passion and an aphoristic energy that is spellbinding. He's less persuasive, predictably, when he tries to make the case that communism will bounce back and win in the end. He remains, though, a great provocateur and an immensely suggestive and even dashing writer. "Reality exists so that we can speculate about it," he says, and another recent paperback, "In Defense of Lost Causes" (Verso: 504 pp., $19.95) presents a more sweeping panorama of his contentious perceptions. "We believe, not less, but much more than we imagine we believe," Zizek writes, while his exhilarating imagination burrows like a termite into the foundation of why and how we believe.
November 15, 2009
Paperback Writers: Greek myth is hip, so is Richard Milward's new novel
Dino Buzzati: "Poem Strip" (NYRB Classics)
October 18, 2009
Paperback Writers: Slaughter and rubble
"The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die," Kurt Vonnegut once said, sounding more amused than worried about it. Ever the realist, ever the stoic, ever the cynic, Vonnegut got how the lit game works. Reputations soar, tumble into the trash and rise mysteriously again. The good news is that quality tells in the end; and so here we are, 2 1/2 years after Vonnegut's death, celebrating new books and handsome reprints by a man who, by the time he passed on, had been a part of the liberal furniture for so long ("counter-culture icon," proclaimed the New York Times obituary) it was possible to forget he'd done a life sentence at the typewriter, fighting his suicidal tendency and instead making magic happen.
October 4, 2009
New in paperback: Huxley's demons and the grace of Hanif Kureishi
Aldous Huxley: "The Devils of Loudun" (HarperPerennial)
September 13, 2009
Paperback Writers: A view from the 'Heights'
Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, leaving only one published book and some poems. That book, of course, is "Wuthering Heights" (recently issued in new editions, by Penguin and HarperCollins), a novel so strange and powerful that it sinks into the reader's DNA.
August 16, 2009
Nathanael West and the writing of 'The Day of the Locust'
The year 1939, when Europe was going up in flames and America clung to the hope that it need not become part of a world at war, turned out to be a miracle moment for Los Angeles fiction, seeing the publication of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, John Fante's "Ask The Dust," and "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (the latter just reissued in a new edition, along with "Miss Lonelyhearts," by New Directions, $11.95), three books that distilled distinctly and in very different ways the city that was being written about, and have continued to dictate how Los Angeles is perceived today.
July 19, 2009
'In Such Hard Times' by Red Pine/Bill Porter
"On this day of drink and depression / I think about life on our Tuling farm / where will I be on the Ninth of next year / in such hard times I can't hope to go home," wrote the poet Wei Ying-Wu in the year 756 AD. At the time he was only about 20, and his world was crashing down.
June 21, 2009
Welcome to Banham's Los Angeles
In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene's Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world -- and then the wider world -- perceived the city. Reyner's " Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" -- first published in 1971 -- has now been reissued in a new edition with an excellent introduction by architect and scholar Joe Day (University of California Press: 296 pp., $22.95).
June 21, 2009
Nerds, private eyes and others
Stephen Crane: "An Experiment in Misery" (HarperPerennial)
May 24, 2009
Tricks with a knife
"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" was first published by a small press in the 1970s when its author, Michael Ondaatje, was still in his 20s and two decades away from the success and fame that would arrive with "The English Patient." Yet this early work already shows a door opening into the future; indeed, it might be argued that here, in his meditation on the legendary American outlaw, Ondaatje was already assembling the key tools in his writer's bag.
April 26, 2009
Duke Elric: A cross between Conan and Camus
Maybe it's the books we read when we're young that stick with us the longest. That's the time when books not only excite us, but seem to tell us about ourselves and our futures. As a teenager I read (wallowed in and feasted upon, really) Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, "Great Expectations" and "David Copperfield," "Crime and Punishment," "The Great Gatsby," P.G. Wodehouse and Kafka. A predictably unstructured and non-academic bag, I guess. I also read, with mounting glee, and seized from different corners of the bookstore when my mother wasn't watching, the paperbacks of Michael Moorcock, especially those concerning the doomed prince Elric.
March 29, 2009
Patrick White's cruel visionaries
Patrick White, the first great novelist to come out of Australia, was born in 1912, won the Nobel Prize in 1973, died in 1990 and his work promptly dropped from fashion. His style of narrative-driven psychological modernism seemed outmoded, perhaps, when the highbrow section of the literary marketplace had turned to the exuberant post-modernism of Salman Rushdie and David Foster Wallace, on the one hand, and the differently stylized realisms of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro on the other. A chapter from one of White's novels, submitted pseudonymously to a list of top publishers in 2007, was rejected by every one of them. White -- who was gay, had a gallows wit and self-consciously cast himself as an outsider, both ahead of his times and behind them -- would have seen the humor in that. He once said that he had wasted his life writing and should have stuck to "learning to cook properly."
March 1, 2009
Dreams of a dreamer
Eric Kraft is an oddball, an eccentric, a bit of a genius -- the writerly equivalent of a dreamer who puts together weird and wonderful contraptions in his garage. For almost 30 years, and through many books, he has been crafting "The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy," a series of fictions framed as memoir, or maybe they're just fictionalized memoir, bits of life seen in a dizzying metafictional mirror. Reading these books and trying to figure out where Kraft stops and Leroy begins is part of the mystery here, and part of the fun.
March 1, 2009
New in paperback: Richard Yates, Denis Johnson, Charles Baxter and more
Barry Day (ed): "The Letters of Noel Coward" (Vintage)
February 1, 2009
New in paperback
Al Alvarez: "The Biggest Game in Town" (Picador)
February 1, 2009
Exquisite strangers
When money will have nothing to do with me,
January 4, 2009
New in paperback
New in paperback: : Getting personal
"The Journals of John Cheever" edited by Robert Gottlieb (Vintage)
January 4, 2009
'Humboldt's Gift' by Saul Bellow
"Humboldt's Gift," first published in 1975 and just re-issued (Penguin: 512 pp., $16), is both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow's genius. "The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that," the book begins.
December 7, 2008
A life runs backward
F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which forms the basis for the new David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt, originally appeared in Collier's on May 27, 1922 (earlier the story had been rejected by Metropolitan), and was then featured in Fitzgerald's second story collection, "Tales of the Jazz Age."
November 9, 2008
'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' by Michael Chabon
"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" was first published back in 1988 and immediately tagged a "brat pack" novel, causing its author, the then preposterously young Michael Chabon (he was still only in his early 20s) to be spoken of in the same breath as Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz -- admirable enough writers whose careers, it's fair to say, he has by now wholly eclipsed. Viewed in hindsight, though, "Pittsburgh" belongs to a more familiar category. It's a coming-of-age story, and a classic in that genre, the chronicle of a single summer, a structure that Chabon, always eager to flaunt his influences rather than show any anxiety about them, borrowed, lifted (whatever), from "The Great Gatsby."
November 9, 2008
Reasons to shiver: New in paperback
"The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III" edited by Philip Gourevitch (Picador)
October 12, 2008
New in paperback: The pioneers of the police procedural, Iraq by way of Homer and the Crusades through Muslim eyes
"Immoveable Feast" by John Baxter (Harper Perennial)
October 12, 2008
The Truman show
"Dearest Cecil," wrote Truman Capote from Brooklyn on April 19, 1965, addressing his friend, the English photographer and bon vivant Cecil Beaton. The letter is among those collected in "Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote" (Vintage: 512 pp., $16 paper). "This is just an exhausted scrawl (you owe me a letter anyway), but I wanted you and Kin to know the case is over and my book is coming out next January. Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday. I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something I will never really get over."
August 17, 2008
Where's Weldon?
The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Kees had often spoken of killing himself and had once planned, with James Agee, to write a book on famous suicides; together they came up with a wonderful title, "How-Not-To-and-Why-Not-To-Do-It," though the project came to nothing. Both men were too busy plotting their own deaths.
July 20, 2008
True New Yorker
About two years ago, when rats came down from a lowquat tree and began scratching around and scuttling around in the crawl space beneath our Venice home, I made my wife laugh (and wince) by reading to her from Joseph Mitchell's classic 1944 New Yorker piece "The Rats on the Waterfront":
June 22, 2008
Paperback writers
Two timeless, Depression-era novels from Edward Anderson
Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a prizefighter, had some small success as a musician and, when the Great Depression of the 1930s hit, roamed the roads and rails, learning the life of the hobo. This crucial experience led to fiction, and to his first novel, "Hungry Men" (University of Oklahoma Press, currently out of print, but with plenty of copies available on Amazon), which in 1933 caused the Saturday Review of Literature to pronounce him the heir to Hemingway and Faulkner.
May 25, 2008
Paperback Writers
His wit was hard-boiled
WE think we know Damon Runyon, and we might think we're pretty jaded about him, but a fat new anthology, " 'Guys and Dolls' and Other Writings" (Penguin: 636 pp., $18 paper), introduced by Pete Hamill and edited and annotated by Cornell professor Daniel R. Schwarz, makes us see afresh a writer whose hard-bitten and ironic point of view prefigures the fictional worlds of "The Godfather" and "The Sopranos." There's much more to Runyon than Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra looking sharp and talking cute in the 1955 film version of "Guys and Dolls."
April 27, 2008
Dreams of an endless summer
By Richard Rayner
March 2, 2008
No thanks, James
By Richard Rayner
July 22, 2007
Paperback writers
His own brand
Almost 50 years ago, in 1959, Philip Roth published "Goodbye, Columbus," a coming-of-age love story that was short, sharp, tender and pitch-perfect, and won the National Book Award. Few writers have launched a career so auspiciously. Roth, of course, went on to win pretty much every other literary prize going, achieving almost uncontrollable celebrity with his 1969 novel "Portnoy's Complaint." Here, obviously, was a big career.
February 3, 2008
Giving Angela Carter her due
By Richard Rayner
January 6, 2008
The magical and the elemental, from Halldór Laxness
By Richard Rayner
December 9, 2007
Aging gracefully: Ken Kesey's "Cuckoo" and "Notion"
By Richard Rayner
November 11, 2007
Unexpected affinities
Careers have arcs. Writers develop and change, as evidenced by "I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 360 pp., $16), a new bilingual anthology of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" (Vintage: 384 pp., $14.95), a collection of 24 stories spanning more than two decades by Haruki Murakami. Neruda died in 1973 at 69, while Murakami, approaching 60, is happily very much still with us.
Resurrecting Derek Raymond, a.k.a. the first Robin Cook
Robin Cook, the first Robin Cook (not the guy who writes bestselling medical thrillers), was born in London in 1931 and died there 63 years later, suggesting an order otherwise absent in a chaotic and almost dottily brave life. Cook, married five times, was the son of a millionaire British textile magnate, born with the silver spoon and all that. He went to school at Eton, "the assembly line for rulers and bastards" (as he called it). Then, rather than proceed to Oxbridge or the army, he rebelled against his background, drifting into a world of petty, and sometimes not so petty, crime — his affable manners and toff accent were useful in ways that he hadn't expected. He was an excellent con man.
September 16, 2007
Paperback Writers
Ayn Rand's epic storytelling
By Richard Rayner
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times


text: Petraeus Scandal Highlights Dangerous Weakness in U.S. Counterintelligence Print article Send a Tip by John Guandolo 20 Nov 2012 post a comment I travel across America teaching and briefing on the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood's Movement here and how they (and others) have insinuated themselves at the highest levels of our government and national security apparatus. The one question I most frequently get from Members of Congress, local/state/federal law enforcement, military and intelligence professionals, state legislators, and citizens is this: How is it possible that the enemy has gained access to our senior leadership without any apparent resistance? I believe the current scandal involving General Petraeus is instructive in answering this question. Our greatest national security weakness from a leadership standpoint is the staggeringly unprofessional inability of U.S. leaders to discern between friend and foe. They simply appear to have no radar for an enemy who comes at them wearing a suit (or dress) and a smile. At the center of the Petraeus scandal is a young attractive woman named Jill Kelley, whose complaints brought General Petraeus' affair with Paula Broadwell to light. Kelley, whose maiden name is Jill Khawam, is of Lebanese decent and her family arrived in the United States in the 1970's. She is the 37 year old wife of an oncologist in the Tampa, Florida area. The U.S. military has described her as an "unpaid social liaison" - whatever that is. Most importantly, through her social activities surrounding the military Jill Kelley managed to gain access to a large number of U.S. 4-star generals and admirals, many of whom have attended functions in her home. And, according to sources, no one inside the military intelligence community has conducted any type of investigation into Mrs. Kelley's background. This raises serious counter-intelligence questions. One must assume that all it takes to get close to senior American officials is to appear to be friendly and helpful, and you are in the door. No need to look at any background information, facts or evidence. Just take their word for it. It works for the Muslim Brotherhood, so why not in other areas. What is astonishing, is that at no point is there any indication, neither publicly or according to sources close to this issue, that anyone asked the right question. Who is this woman? What are her true intentions? The U.S. Central Command responded to their own relationship with Jill Kelley by issuing a statement which included the following: Jill Kelley held "no official position with the U.S. Central Command. She is a volunteer and a private citizen, not an employee." This is true. However, what Jill Kelley did have was influence. She appears to be the kind of woman who can pick up a phone to any one of a number of 4-star generals, base commanders or the FBI, and get a response. From an intelligence and counter-intelligence perspective, Mrs. Kelley bears many red flags of an intelligence officer, and her activities look an awful lot like a successful intelligence gathering operation. To be clear, at this point in time, we cannot say - and I don't believe - Jill Kelley is working on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency. This may all simply be an unsavory affair gone public. However, if she were working for a hostile foreign government, she would be given an award for her ability to be welcomed into the senior levels of the U.S. military without even a second look. "Just look good, sound good, and tell them you want to do good, and the Americans will believe you." Words similar to these come right out of the playbooks of the Soviets, the Muslim Brotherhood, and many others. Does America still have a counter-intelligence apparatus? If so, it appears to be non-functional above the GS-14 paygrade. Here are the questions Americans should be asking themselves and their elected officials: 1) How is someone like Jill Kelley able to get very close to and have relationships with so many senior American military officers without a formal vetting process or investigation? (2) Is their formal and detailed counter-intelligence training for American civilian and military leaders which trains them to be aware of, identify, and report attempted penetrations and recruitments by foreign intelligence services? (hint: the answer is no - a one hour online course every three years doesn't count); (3) Do the standard procedures for vetting government employees and contractors for security clearances readily highlight counter-intelligence threats? (hint: the answer is no). We seem to have quickly forgotten the tale of Nada Prouty, the attractive FBI Special Agent who also became a CIA Case Officer. Prouty, a Lebanese national, fraudulently gained her citizenship through a sham marriage. She was able to get hired by the FBI and then by the CIA. Her sister and brother-in-law attended Hizbollah fundraisers, and her brother-in-law has a close relationship with at least one senior Hizbollah leader. Prouty pled guilty to searching FBI data systems to see if her family members were linked to Hizbollah. Prouty was given a full background investigation and a polygraph examination before being hired by the FBI. As a seasoned FBI agent told me years ago, "When I came into the FBI, anyone who approached me was a potential target of an investigation or a potential source, until proven otherwise. We were taught to keep our guard up." This mentality seems to be gone inside the agencies charged with protecting the citizens of the United States, and apparently among senior military leaders as well. This dangerous naivete is destructive to America's national security in immeasurable ways. If this attitude is as prevalent as it appears to be among U.S. leaders, Americans are in even greater danger than we thought.

subset: commoncrawl


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In the wake of the horrible incident at the Boston Marathon on Monday afternoon, sports leagues around the country are looking to improve their security measures to ensure the safety of fans and observers that come to their events. The NFL is doing their best effort to "review and enhance" security measures at Radio City Music Hall for next week's 2013 NFL Draft.
"The NFL and its clubs have operated with a very high level of security since 9/11 for all of our games and events," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said, via Pro Football Talk. "For next week's NFL Draft, we will review and enhance our already comprehensive security plans with the NYPD, Radio City and our private security partners. We will advise the public more specifically next week prior to the Draft."
With the combined efforts of the NFL and New York authorities, fans should feel safe attending the big event in New York City. There is plenty of time to prepare and enhance security for the event, and New York's finest will do their best to make sure everyone in attendance is in good hands.
Tags: 2013 NFL Draft NFL


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Is e-mail secure?
When you send an e-mail message using your Princeton account, the first step is for it to travel over the Princeton University network to your e-mail server or "local post office." The exchange between your computer and your local post office could theoretically be viewed by someone with access to the local post office or to the network hardware. However, until recently, such access has been controlled and limited to a few authorized members of the support staff, so the risk until recently has been minimal.
However, with the advent of wireless communications, the communication between your computer and the local post office travels part of the way through the air. During that time, it is quite vulnerable to being intercepted by anyone who can obtain one of many the readily available eavesdropping devices in the marketplace. One way to protect the confidentiality of e-mail between your workstation and the local post office, even over wireless, is to make sure your computer's e-mail program is configured to encrypt its exchanges with the local post office. Many of the University's workstations are set up in this manner, but not all. To confirm that your e-mail program encrypts its communications with the local post office, please contact your LAN administrator.
Thus far, we have only delivered an e-mail message to the local post office. The next step is for the local post office to send it to the recipient's post office for distribution. If the sender and recipient are connected to the same post office, i.e., they are both users of the Princeton e-mail system, then this step involves no movement of the e-mail across the network, so the risk is low, as access to the local post office is controlled. But if the recipient's post office is located outside of the Princeton network, then the e-mail will travel across the Internet, through networks and servers over which we have no control. We have no idea what security measures their administrators have in place nor do we know who could gain access to the data once it leaves our campus network.
It is important to note that the option discussed above of having your computer communicate with your local post office in an encrypted manner does not reduce the risk of e-mail exposure between your local post office and other post offices, as these devices communicate with each other in an unencrypted form.
Ultimately, the off-campus recipient receives our e-mail through his/her own connection with his/her post office. Again, we do not know whether that interaction is encrypted, what controls are placed on either device or the network between, or whether unprotected wireless communication is involved.
A word of caution: If you are on campus, exchanging e-mail with another individual on campus, but one or both of you are using an off-campus e-mail system, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or that of another University or organization, your e-mail messages are at risk since they will travel some of the time over potentially insecure networks.
How to secure confidential e-mail
If everyone on campus connected to the Princeton e-mail servers in an encrypted manner, e-mail exchanged among Princeton University accounts would have a low risk of exposure.
However, when e-mail involves off-campus senders or recipients, the best alternative to ensure confidentiality is to use an "end-to-end encryption" product, such as PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy"). Such products allow the sender of an e-mail message to selectively encrypt its content before sending, and allow each recipient to decrypt that same content upon receipt.
PGP and similar end-to-end encryption products use a "public key" encryption system where each user is given two keys, interrelated in such a way that whatever is encrypted using one key can be decrypted only with the other, and vice versa.
As implemented, these products define one of each person's generated keys as his/her "private" key and the other as his/her "public" key. Each individual must always guard his or her "private" key and must not share with anyone. However, his or her "public" key can be freely made available to anyone who wishes to send encrypted messages to the individual and can even be placed in a directory.
The above technology not only provides individuals with the ability to encypt messages, but also to verify the identity of the e-mail sender through the use of digital signatures.
It is important to note that message encryption and digital signatures can only be used if both the sender and recipient have each:
- installed compatible end-to-end encryption products on his or her computer,
- had his or her personal pair of keys created - a public key used to encrypt messages and a private key to decrypt them,
- sent his or her public key to the other party (or had it stored it in a common directory),
- saved the public encryption key received from the other party (unless it is stored in a common directory).
E-mail is a convenient mode of communication and is integral to the business of the University. However, e-mail also makes it easy for people to share misleading or fraudulent information, to perpetuate Internet "urban legends," and to "spam" (send unsolicited mass-mailings for marketing or other exploitive purposes).
Sometimes the origin of spam mailings is clear. At other times the true origin has been disguised in some way. Presently, no Federal legislation prohibits such spam. The laws of New Jersey also do not presently prohibit such electronic mailings. There are laws in some other states which have been used to prosecute spammers, and some Federal legislation which might provide more protection also has been proposed.
Until there are better means of protection, here are some tips for dealing with spam.
- Never reply to the e-mail. Ignore e-mail addresses or World Wide Web URLs provided for you to use "if you do not want to receive such mail in the future." These frequently just verify the accuracy of your e-mail address (and that you read junk e-mail!), and result in even more spam coming your way.
- If you just want to get on with things, just delete the piece of mail.
- If you want to file a complaint, look at the full headers of the message to find out where the mail originated. (Often the abbreviated headers show incorrect information.) You might need to verify the domain from which the mail originated by checking the "IP Address" shown for the point of origin. The OIT Help Desk can assist you to display and interpret the full headers which should help identify or verify the domain from which the mail originated. (Some groups offer help in complaining about spam. Use "Helpful Links" below for more information.) Most registered Internet domains provide e-mail addresses for domain authorities; complaints should be sent to such authorities. The text of the objectionable message, and the full headers of the message, also should be included with the complaint.
- Don't be fooled. Spammers have many tricks. Here are two:
- Using one person's Princeton NetID in the "To:" line as the intended recipient, when the mail is really going to many Princeton addresses. (Some people think they have received another's e-mail, and others think the person whose name appears is the one who sent the spam. Neither is true.)
- Saying you are receiving the mail because you have visited a certain kind of website or because you have expressed interest in this kind of material. (It's a marketing ploy. You were probably selected randomly.)
- Use filters if your mail program provides them. You can filter out some of the more obviously tagged mailings (e.g., anything with subject line saying "Adult Content" or "Advertisement"). The OIT Help Desk can assist you in setting up filters.
Chain letters
Chain letters are a particular type of spam where the recipient is encouraged to forward the e-mail to a number of other individuals by being told that he/she would receive something good (e.g., good luck, health, money) if he/she complied or something bad (e.g., illness, injury, death) if he/she didn't. The primary goal of such chain letters is to flood the system with thousands of pieces of e-mail. If the number is ten, the first individual would send ten e-mail messages, the recipients would send one hundred (ten each), their recipients would send one thousand, etc. To protect our network and systems, please do not forward such e-mail messages.
Chain letters are also used to promote ILLEGAL pyramid schemes where the recipient is told to send an amount of money to those above him/her on the pyramid and (in theory) would receive money from those below him/her on the pyramid. Electronic pyramid schemes are no different than their paper-based predecessors that occasionally passed through the postal service; their goal is to separate you from your money and they are illegal.


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The Liberty Ranch Hawks jumped out to a 9-2 lead and then held off a furious Galt comeback in a 13-10 win over the Galt Warriors in varsity softball on Wednesday.
Galt scored six times in the fourth inning to cut the deficit to 11-9 and added another run in the sixth to get to within one, but Liberty Ranch (6-4, 3-0 Sierra Valley Conference) responded with two runs in the seventh to secure the victory.
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Adventure Time: Candy Capers Issue #2 is out TOMORROW! It's available at every comic shop worth it's weight in sweets (see what I did there?)!
It's written by Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota (Johnny Wander), drawn by Ian McGinty (artist of the Hello Kitty and UglyDoll comics), colored by Maarta Laiho, and hand-lettered by me (Hannah Nance Partlow)! ♥
Enjoy this sweet preview!
(Cover A: Yuko Ota - Cover B: Brinsome Thieme - Cover C: Jemma Salume - Cover D: Scott Maynard) Published by BOOM! Studios.


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Career Master Planning: How to Find Work You Love to Do
- Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Master planning means taking responsibility for planning your life while recognizing that the Lord is ultimately in charge. As Richard Bolles, the Christian author of "What Color is Your Parachute?" has written, "Pray, as though everything depended on God; then work, as though everything depended on you." Career success comes through working in partnership with God!
Career Master Planning consists of four consecutive action stages. Each stage has specific questions to be addressed, as indicated below:
Action Stage 1 – Assessing My Design: Who am I? What is my God-given design? What do I enjoy doing, what do I value, what motivates me, what brings me a sense of fulfillment and meaning? What gifts and abilities has God given to me to use in this world? What needs, issues and/or causes do I find compelling and desire to address in my work?
Action Stage 2 – Exploring Careers: Which careers (or self-employment opportunities) potentially fit my design? Which would give me a sense of mission and purpose in my work?
Action Stage 3 – Making My Career Decision(s): Which option best fits my design (and other important criteria such as impact on family, salary needs, etc.)? Which best enables me to make a contribution to making this world a better place? In which do I believe I could serve God and others most effectively?
Action Stage 4 – Implementing My Decisions (Conducting a job search; gaining training or education; beginning self-employment, etc.): What are the necessary action steps to achieving my career dream/goal? How do I obtain a job in my chosen field? What are the best job search strategies to use? How do I best market myself? OR What are the best options for getting necessary training/education? OR What is the sequence of steps I need to take to become self-employed successfully?
Career Master Planning is based on the belief that God has created you to be a unique individual, with a specific design of abilities and interests. His desire is for you to work out of your design; that is, find work that utilizes what you love to do. He wants you to experience the joy and satisfaction that comes from doing the work He created you to do. In so doing, you glorify Him. To work out of your design, however, you must know what it is. Therefore, you begin your master planning by discovering and/or deepening your understanding of your design through an assessment process which can include career tests, exercises, etc.
Once you know the key pieces of your design such as the skills you most want to use within work, the interests you are passionate about, the values that are critical to your sense of work satisfaction, the work factors that motivate you, etc. you are then ready to explore possible options that fit your design. Exploration can include brainstorming strategies to identify and create options that would utilize your design, using written resources like "The Occupational Outlook Handbook" and "The Dictionary of Occupational Titles," and conducting informational interviews with people who are doing the types of jobs in which you are interested.
Making a good career decision depends on three factors: 1) Having the right information about yourself; 2) Having the right information about the world of work; and, 3) Using good decision making strategies. Action stages 1 and 2 will provide you with the right information; your task in action stage 3 is to learn how to appropriately evaluate the information. Most people go with a "gut feel" about a job; sometimes this works out, but often it doesn't. Comparing options against key parts of your design, evaluating both the short-term and long-term pros and cons of options, and other strategies will help you make a well-thought through decision. Prayer certainly needs to be a part of the decision making process, but it doesn't replace our responsibility to develop maturity and wisdom in how we make life choices.
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Jul 6, 2013
rom Anil Kumar Acharya RSB TRANSMISSION (I) LTD,PLANT 3 ADITYAPUR INDUSTRIAL AREA,PHASE 7, JAMSHEDPUR-831013 Sub- cheating & fraud by builder Dear sir I had booked a 3 BHK flat in JAMSHEDPUR (Jharkhand) in October 2008 ,planning for my retirement due in the year 2017.The builder could not deliver the flat as promised. After lot of chasing ,Finally in June 2012 Builder informed me that he is unable to deliver the flat and ready to pay me back the amount paid to him with 12 % simple interest. I finally agreed to the payment as I was fed up chasing him. Builder gave me 3 cheques of equal installment and the cheque encashment is also distributed over 3 months. I deposited the first cheque on 25-06-12 and it bounced and the bank report was "exceeds the arrangement". Again I deposited the 2 ND cheque on 26-07-12 and it also bounced and the bank report was "exceeds the arrangement" Again I deposited the 3 rd cheque on 16-09-12 and it also bounced. I have tried to contact the builder and he is not responding positively and only replying "I am arranging your money". After lot of chase up ,builder gave only 7.5L out of 16 L on 4-11-2012 and gave me in writing that balance payment will be made positively by 15-11-12 but still He has not paid a single paisa till date. So I filed 3 nos of legal cases in civil court against the builder for bouncing of 03 nos of cheque in sept 12. The builder did not appear for any hearings and finally court has issued a non bailable warrant against him in june 2013 and till date local police has not arrested the builder. I donot know how long the legal case will continue… and how long also police will play hide and seek with the builder. I am frustrated over the builder's attitude and I request your kind intervention to solve my problem at the earliest. BUILDER'S NAME- GAURI ASSOCIATES, GROUND FLOOR ,NIROD APPARTMENT(IN FRONT OF RAYMOND SHOW ROOM) L ROAD, BISTUPUR,JAMSHEDPUR-831001 (JHARKHAND) CONTACT PERSON- Mr. Rohit kumar Singh Mob- 9334156122 Regards Anil Acharya RSB TRANSMISSION (I) LTD, UNIT –III PLOT NO 730 TO 732 & 1038, WORD NO 9 ASANGI, GAMHARIA, SARAIKELA, Jamshedpur JHARKHAND-832108 INDIA


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The doors to Inman Tire and Feed have been open for business for the last
automotive repair services along with tire and wheel sales to customers from Inman, SC, Spartanburg, SC, Greer, SC, Tryon, SC, Columbus, SC, and other surrounding areas since 1980. We are open Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM and Saturday from 8:00 AM – noon.
Inman Tire and Feed is a pillar of the Inman, SC community. Inman Tire and Feed is a leader in offering name brand tires, wheels, auto repair and brake services for customers located in and around the Inman, South Carolina area. We have satisfied customers who purchased our tires and auto repairs from Tryon, NC, Columbus, NC, and Mill Spring, NC. Our goal is to focus on customer service. It is the foundation of our business. Inman Tire and Feed employs a well-trained staff specializing in the sale and installation of passenger car, performance and light truck or SUV tires. If you're looking for tires in Landrum, SC or auto repairs in Boiling Springs, SC, Inman Tires can help. Custom wheels are available at Inman Tire and Feed. Special wheels and rims complement any tire or customer vehicle. Complete under-car services, such as oil changes, brakes, shocks, struts, alignment, transmission filter change and fluid drain for both foreign and domestic vehicles are readily available at competitive prices. Take this opportunity to browse the Inman Tire and Feed website or call us for personalized service. We carry ATV, lawn & garden tires.
Inman Tire and Feed Location:
Inman, SC – Looking for tires in Inman, SC then Inman Tire and Feed has the right tires for your car. Our Inman, South Carolina location offers many Inman, SC tires that are affordable and other Inman, SC tire services for your car. We offer auto repair services to the Inman, South Carolina community including brakes, tune ups, and any other Inman, SC auto repair services your car might need. Give our Inman, SC location a call at (864) 472-2001 today to schedule an appointment.
Inman Tire and Feed located at 11841 Asheville Highway, Inman, SC 29349 provides quality automotive products and services to customers in Inman, SC, Spartanburg, SC, Duncan, SC and Greer, SC. Inman Tire and Feed is the leading seller in Inman, SC for these tire brands MICHELIN®, BFGoodrich® and Uniroyal® and offers some great discounts on them. Inman Tire and Feed also offers services in Tires, Auto Repairs and Wheels for the communities of Inman, SC, Spartanburg, SC, and Greer, SC. Give Inman Tire and Feed a call at (864) 472-2001 to schedule an appointment today!


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Mind your language:
- Jeremy Brown: Now, although most sports are international, there are some sports that are native to different countries. For example, the national sport of France is...
- Danielle Favre: Football!
- Jeremy Brown: Correct! And the national sport for Italy is...
- Giovanni Capello: Girls!
- Jeremy Brown: That's not a sport!
- Giovanni Capello: Maybe not, but it's more popular than football!
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