Weekly Review

By Claire Gutierrez

Senator Barack Obama, having amassed more than the 2,118 delegates needed to secure a majority, was acknowledged as the Democratic presidential nominee and claimed victory before a crowd of almost 20,000 people in St. Paul, Minnesota, knocking knuckles with his wife, Michelle, in a gesture known as “dap.” “It thrilled a lot of black folks,” said author Ta-Nehisi Coates. “He wears his cultural blackness all over the place. Barack is like Black Folks 2.0.”^{1 2} Earlier that evening, Senator John McCain delivered a speech to a crowd of a few hundred in Kenner, Louisiana, in which he tried to rebuff Obama's charges that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of Bush policies. “That's not change we can believe in,” said McCain repeatedly. Pundits were surprised by McCain's clumsy rhetoric, by his lack of teleprompter skills, and by the fact that he stood in front of an ugly green backdrop. “Content better than delivery,” said Karl Rove. “John McCain,” said Mort Kondracke of “Roll Call,” “sounded old.”^{3 4} A messenger delivered a handwritten note from McCain to Obama's Chicago offices inviting the Democratic presidential nominee to a series of Goldwater-Kennedy-style debates. Bill Burton, an aide to Obama, told the messenger, “You know, you could have just emailed this.”⁵ Hillary Clinton announced that she was “suspending” her campaign,⁶ and Yves Saint Laurent, who popularized pants for women, died at age 71. “My small job as a couturier,” Saint Laurent once said, “is to make clothes that reflect our times. I’m convinced women want to wear pants.”⁷

Unemployment rose half a percentage point to 5.5 percent, the largest one-month increase since 1986. Oil prices surged by more than $11 a barrel to a new high of $138.54, and the stock market suffered a 3 percent drop. ⁸ Officials in Tanzania reported that witch doctors were harvesting the hair, bones, and skins of albinos to make wealth potions,⁹ and scientists who darkened the breast feathers of male barn swallows with magic marker found that the males attracted more females, lost weight, and exuded more testosterone. “It's like you walk down the street and you're driving a Rolls Royce and people notice,” said lead researcher Rebecca Safran. “Your physiology accommodates this.”¹⁰ The United Nations held a three-day emergency food summit; the director of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization condemned U.S. subsidies for biofuel, saying that they deprived people of food in order to “satisfy a thirst for fuel for vehicles.”^{11 12} For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit. ¹³

V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Literature, declared that there are “no more great writers.”¹⁴ Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel in 1992, read a new poem, entitled “The Mongoose,” that viciously attacks Naipaul's personality and his writing. “I have been bitten,” the poem begins, “I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as Naipaul's fiction.”¹⁵ More than two dozen vandals who hosted a party inside Robert Frost's former home were ordered to take a class on his poetry, taught by Frost's biographer. “This is where Frost is relevant,” Jay Parini said to the class, speaking about Frost's poem “The Road Not Taken.” “You come to a path in the woods where you can say, 'Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?' Everything in life is choices.”¹⁶ A housing development in South Carolina was offering to any customers who purchased one of its $1 million homes a $400,000 home for free. “We thought,” said developer Dawn Berry, “'Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants?'”¹⁷ The family of a former chemist for Procter & Gamble who designed the Pringles potato-chip can buried a portion of his ashes in a Pringles can,¹⁸ and Haley, an eight-year-old Indiana girl who had emergency surgery after eating more than 10 magnets and 20 steel balls, said she swallowed the pieces because they “looked like candy.” Her parents said they were confused about how she could have done such thing because “she gets A's and B's.”¹⁹ Scientists located the part of the brain responsible for understanding sarcasm.²⁰