The Week in Review

Tuesday on the Report, we kicked off the new template design with Niall Ferguson's explanation of why Obama is winning. We had a look at some of the press surrounding the release of Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Ashton and made one of many links between the Satanic Verses affair and the recent violence over an anti-Islamic film. Shock for the sake of shock is no longer enough in the art world, nor was it ever, and there's a blog for everything, including unhelpful self-help. Paul Ryan really wants you to know he's fit. Love in the time of YouTube is a strange thing, with viral video proposals and all. We had a first instalment of the response to Mitt Romney's notorious comment about the so-called 47 percent. In short, "From someone wanting to be president, this is unbe-fucking-lievable." Also, Mitt Romney is himself a member of that half, and George Romney was on welfare, thus in his son's eyes a freeloader operating in an entitlement society.

Later that day, we delivered a quick examination of Michael Lewis' wonderful VF profile of Obama, considered the problems associated with a meritocratic society, and asked if a robot could be algorithmically moral. A liberal took up the challenge to survive on only Fox-like conservative news outlets. David Byrne has some thoughts on how our brains process music. A conservative blogger concedes that Mitt Romney needs to do something drastic. Christopher Buckley and wife Carol Blue wrote about the publication of Mortality and its author, Christopher Hitchens. The Occupy movement turned a year old; I renewed my former pessimism and considered myself and others vindicated. The Catholic Confessional really could help solve the dishonesty of the banking industry. Do America's corporations really care about how much people earn? Not really.

Wednesday began with a rebuke of Mitt Romney's political philosophy. We found out that one of the ways in which you get people to actually turn out on election day is to make them think that voting is somehow cool; voter ID laws, in a related post, fix a non-existent problem. We thanked our lucky stars that science fiction writers are generally incorrect. We looked further at who, exactly, comprises the 47 percent, and decided that Amy Davidson gets it. We also parsed the second release of Romneytape, a comment on the supposed lack of any desire among Palestinians, in Romney's view, to make peace. I defended Maureen Dowd, who was accused of making anti-semitic allusions in a recent column, and said that terms like anti-Semite and Islamophobe can be abused, employed as a shield to deflect legitimate criticism. Clint Eastwood says of his recent appearance at the RNC that the organisers should have known what was coming. The rise of e-books continues, and rap is poetry. New evidence suggests Jesus may have had a wife. Filmmakers have pet typefaces. Randy Newman has a new satirical song out. The market continues to be awash with pseudo-scientific books.

Thursday, we asked if Romney's latest faux pas was a turning point, or just the scandal of the week, and at the same time looked at the nature of political coverage in the US. Rushdie has his own views on the 'Innocence of Muslims' controversy. David Carr profiled Neil Young.

On Friday, we had a look at the political novel, the idea that vocab shrinks with age, and how Fox News spins a gaffe.

[Note: I wasn't feeling well near the end of the week. Sorry for the lack of posts.]