John Brown's Notes and Essays

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) walks to the Senate floor after attending a Democratic policy luncheon on Capitol Hill on Oct. 26. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post );   from

  image from   Analysis by  Allison Morrow , CNN Business Updated 8:00 PM ET, Thu October 28, 2021;  see also, also see SO META Once upon a time, it was  The  Facebook. Then that definite article got the boot, and the world got to know simply Facebook (good call, Justin Timberlake).  Now we have Meta , a nod to the company's "metaverse" ambitions (more on that dystopian hellscape in a moment).   ICYMI:  Mark Zuckerberg announced the company he founded 17 years ago is getting a rebrand, effectively demoting Facebook's namesake site to just one of several in the company's stable of apps, which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp.   Enter your email to subscribe to the CNN Business Newsletter. close dialog BEFORE MARKETS OPEN START YOUR DAY SMART Get essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign Me Up No Thanks By subscribing you agree to our privacy policy. Naturally, it's getting a new stoc...

From a New York Times e-mail (via LJB) The author Gary Shteyngart in Red Hook, N.Y. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times 8. Are we ready for a pandemic novel?  Gary Shteyngart, the author of “Our Country Friends,” thinks so. Last year, he was 240 pages into a dystopian comedy when the first wave of the coronavirus hit and  dropped it to start a new novel , about a group of old friends who decamp for the country to escape Covid. Now “Our Country Friends” is being lauded as “the great American pandemic novel.”  Our reviewer agrees  and says it’s Shteyngart’s finest novel yet. “The constant state where terrible things are happening to every single member of society, where you can’t escape, that’s going to be the new normal,” Shteyngart said. “So we have to change the way we write.” ... The living room in the reconstructed Alexander Palace, which opened as a museum in August. Mary Gelman for The New York Times 10. And finally, take a tour of a Russian czar’s palace. For mor...

The State Department is easing some restrictions after employees said that their jobs overseas were harder than they needed to be. image (not from article) from By Lara Jakes , The New York Times ,  Oct. 27, 2021 Updated 7:43 p.m. ET [ original article contains links and a video ] WASHINGTON — It was known at the State Department as the Benghazi hangover: strict security protocols to protect U.S. officials abroad from terrorism that, in practice, limited their interactions with people in the countries where they served. Nine years after a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed during a riot in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department is easing some of the restrictions, which had made routine diplomacy more difficult during the coronavirus pandemic and as crime surged .  The shift was announced on Wednesday as part of a retooling of the department — an exercise afforded to each secretary of state — that will also solicit more input on policy from employees, expand ...

Social-media company sees growing market for digital clothes, tools in an online world people will inhabit Image from article: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the experiences Facebook will introduce as it creates the metaverse should lure and excite audiences such as younger adults. PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS Image from article: In August, Facebook launched public testing of Horizon Workrooms, an app that lets people who are wearing its Oculus Quest 2 virtual-reality headsets enter virtual offices as avatars. PHOTO: FACEBOOK/ZUMA PRESS  By Meghan Bobrowsky , The Wall Street Journal Oct. 26, 2021 8:52 am ET [ original article contains links ] Mark Zuckerberg says he has long imagined a virtual world where people work, play and interact. Now he’s preparing to spend billions of dollars and years of effort at making that a reality so Facebook Inc. FB -4.65% can prosper. Facebook on Monday said its spending on Facebook Reality Labs, where the company works on augmented and virtua...

image from article   Credit...Frank Augugliaro   By John Pomfret , The New York Times , Oct. 25, 2021  Mr. Pomfret is the author of the forthcoming book “From Warsaw With Love: Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance,” from which this essay is adapted.  The C.I.A. has the closest relationships with the intelligence services from other English-speaking democracies — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So close that their alliance is named the Five Eyes. Even make-believe American and British operatives are thick as thieves. James Bond’s compadre is none other than the C.I.A. officer Felix Leiter, who returns in the latest Bond thriller, “No Time to Die.” But a hugely important intelligence relationship is with another country: Poland. Out of the way, under the radar, the officers from this nation have functioned for decades almost as an adjunct to the agency. “Poland is the 51st state,” a C.I.A. official once recalled James Pavitt...

Image from article: Credit ...Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images    By Margaret Renkl , The New York Times , Oct. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET [original article contains numerous links]  Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.   NASHVILLE — Into these perfect October afternoons, when light gleams on the red dogwood berries and the blue arrowwood berries and the purple beautyberries; on the last of the many-colored zinnias and the last of the yellow marigolds and the last of the white snakeroot flowers; on the shining hair of babies in strollers and the shining ponytails of young mothers and the tender, shining heads of old men walking dogs — into the midst of all this beauty, the kind of beauty that makes despair seem like only a figment of the midnight imagination, the monsters arrive. They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gaso...