Section D (Off Duty):
- Wow, this is incredible. I have just moved into the heart of barbecue country (actually in San Antonio, I was already there, but somehow there's more talk about barbecue up here; be that as it may). So, the very first article I see in today's WSJ: The new barbecue.
From San Antonio:
American cooking is being reinvented before our eyes by the most
creative, skilled generation of chefs in history. It was only a matter
of time before some of them took on the sacred cow of barbecue. At the
Granary 'Cue & Brew in San Antonio, Tim Rattray serves a classic
Texas menu of brisket, ribs, links and other standards at lunch.
From Dallas:
Though not a modernist like Mr. Rattray, Tim Byres at Smoke in Dallas
hews to another great trend in contemporary American cooking: the return
to following the seasons and sourcing ingredients locally. Smoke has
its own vegetable garden and displays a kind of primitivist bent that
feels revolutionary, especially in a city like Dallas, which is so
dominated by big chains. "Dallas is pretty straightlaced," said Mr.
Byres.
Section C (Review):
- DSM-5 run amock. This, by the way, will be why ObamaCare will break the nation:
Today the public complains that psychiatrists seem ready to call
every state of mental distress an illness. They see that any restless
boy can receive a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, that troubled
veterans—whether exposed to combat or not—are routinely said to suffer
from post-traumatic stress disorder, and that enormous numbers of
discouraged, demoralized people are labeled victims of depression and
have medications pressed upon them.
The public is not far wrong. A recent
nationwide diagnostic census based on DSM claimed that the majority of
Americans have or have had a mental disorder. As a result, an appalling
number of young adults in schools and colleges are on one form or
another of psychiatric medication.
In April 1349, as an epidemic of bubonic plague devastated his
subjects, King Edward III of England staged a lavish tournament at
Windsor Castle. This spectacular festival of jousting culminated in the
creation of an exclusive club, the Order of the Garter. Edward was
fascinated by stories of the legendary King Arthur. In founding a new
order of chivalry, he sought to establish his own Knights of the Round
Table, with an expanded Windsor standing in for Camelot.
Yet as Dan Jones amply demonstrates in
"The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England," such
ostentatious display amid the horrors of the Black Death was justified
by harsh personal experience: Edward's father, Edward II, had been
deposed and murdered in 1327 because of his failure to win the respect
of his war-minded nobles. By inviting them to join his new fraternity,
Edward III was not only rallying the military support he needed to
pursue a claim to the crown of France—he had invaded the country in 1346
and warred there consistently through 1359—but taking steps to ensure
that he would never share his father's dismal fate.
Richard III was the last English monarch of Plantagenet descent, but Mr.
Jones's book stops in 1399, with the deposition of Richard II by his
cousin Henry Bolingbroke. This episode ended the run of eight
Plantagenet rulers that began with Henry II in 1154. Between 1399 and
1485, by contrast, the throne was occupied by rival Lancastrian and
Yorkist "cadet" branches of the Plantagenets. (Mr. Jones is currently
writing a sequel that will take the story through the tumultuous 15th
century, culminating in the sporadic bloodletting of the "Wars of the
Roses" and their gory finale at Bosworth.)
The anarchy only ended when Henry's grandson—the offspring of his
daughter Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou—assumed the throne
as Henry II. It was Geoffrey's penchant for wearing a jaunty sprig of
broom (Latin Planta genista) in his cap that gave the dynasty
its evocative name, although it only entered common usage three
centuries later. The dynasty is more strictly known as the "Angevins,"
after Geoffrey's title, Count of Anjou.
Readers can learn all this without tackling Ray Monk's "Robert
Oppenheimer," as Mr. Monk acknowledges in a preface that generously pays
tribute to previous biographers. He credits, above all, the "staggering
amount of research" in Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's "American
Prometheus" (2005). But no biography, Mr. Monk notes, has attempted to
assess Oppenheimer's contributions to physics.
So Mr. Monk devotes many pages to how
Oppenheimer's mind worked, the papers he published, the students he
taught and the reasons why "Oppie" (as he liked to be called) dueled
with his competitors, especially Dirac. Yet the author's approach
demonstrates why previous biographers did not bother with detailed
descriptions of Oppenheimer's scientific papers. The author's summaries
of his subject's work—literary or scientific—arrive dead on the page,
dropped into the narrative, in a way that hardly encourages the reader
to continue.
Ironically, Mr. Monk's account suggests
that Oppenheimer's discoveries were really on the periphery of the
physics research that led to the creation of the atomic bomb.
(Oppenheimer's most original contributions were to astrophysics and to
the discovery of "black holes"—a discovery that neither Oppenheimer nor
his contemporaries were able to appreciate during his lifetime.) While
breakthroughs in nuclear physics excited Oppenheimer, he never explored
them in his own work. An account of his scientific career need not deal
very much with the subject of physics at all. But to understand the
whole man, one must understand why Oppenheimer did not win a Nobel Prize
and why he did not carry on his work in nuclear physics.
Section B (Business & Finance):
- Lots of small stories; not that caught my attention.
Section A:
The widely criticized new version of the U.S. psychiatric diagnostic
manual released Friday faces a potentially diminished role in research,
which would mark a shift for what has been considered the bible of
American psychiatry for 30 years.
This fifth revision of the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the
DSM-5, represents the first major overhaul of the book in nearly 20
years.
This, I suppose, is the medical profession's "rules" akin to the oil industry's rules on fracking.
The U.S. Golf Association said Friday
it will make public on Tuesday its final decision in the
anchored-putting controversy. Nothing is official yet, but all
indications are that the USGA and its international rules-making
counterpart, the R&A, will push forward with the rule they proposed
last November, to ban anchored putting once and for all time.
Op-ed:
openly gay Democratic mayor of Houston. And they say Texas is a red state. LOL.
- Houston's recent track record is startling. For the calendar year ending
in February, it saw the fastest pace of job growth (4.5%) among the
country's 20 largest metropolitan areas. (With a population of 2.1
million, it's the fourth-largest U.S. city.) In 2011, the last year such
data are available, Houston had the fastest-growing large metropolitan
economy, at 3.7%.
US ambassador killed in Benghazi: just so much noise. -- the President
US ambassador killed in Benghazi: what does it matter? -- Hillary
Internal Revenue Scandal in chief, Steven T. Miller, please don't misunderstand me:
Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, The Animals
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