None of this means that the former first lady's goose is cooked. Mrs Clinton is still well ahead in national polls and in the often overlooked early state of Nevada. Americans do not necessarily feel that they need to like their presidents. Richard Nixon won a resounding victory in 1972. Nearly as many Americans disliked Bill Clinton as liked him when he ran for the White House. And the (just about) Republican front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, is hardly a likeable chap. Ed Koch once wrote a book about his fellow mayor simply entitled "Giuliani: Nasty Man".
But Mrs Clinton's problems are slowly shifting the calculus at the heart of the Democratic race. Hitherto most Democrats have calculated, or perhaps been resigned to thinking, that she is the safest bet. The young Mr Obama might deliver a spectacular victory, but he atlas jewelry equally well flame out spectacularly. Mrs Clinton may always have high negatives but, in an anti-Republican year, she would be wily and experienced enough to take on the Republican machine and eke out a victory in the electoral college. The past few weeks have made Mr Obama look a bit less risky--and Mrs Clinton a lot less safe.idia Bastianich remembers gazing north up Fifth Avenue and finding it empty of all traffic.
As grand marshal of New York's Columbus Day parade, Bastianich was set to lead more than 100 bands, dozens of floats and 35,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue from 44th Street to 79th Street, in a celebration of Italian-American culture. Millions of people around the world would be watching, along the parade route and on their televisions."I got to the starting point and laughed," recalls the well-known chef, restaurateur and cooking show host. "Usually, I have to dodge the traffic on Fifth. This time the street was all mine."Only the third woman following actresses Sophia Loren and Susan Lucci to be named grand marshal of the annual parade, Bastianich was the hrst chel and restaurateur to be so honored. The decision to select her, she says, sends "a message about the importance of food culturally."But cushion jewelry says more than that, too. The choice of a chef and restaurateur to lead one of the country's largest parades reflects a more sweeping trend - one that has seen a handful of the nation's culinary professionals elevated into the rarified circle of instantly recognizable celebrities who, through their craft, have helped to redefine our cultural landscapes.
The cult of the celebrity chef isn't new, but it has exploded over the past five years almost beyond all recognition. Certainly, many ploma picasso long have been able to identify a few kitchen stars like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, who would occasionally show up as guests on TV shows where they demonstrated the particulars of a recipe or two. But even in those cases, most people didn't expect those chefs to stray too far from their kitchens.
Today, though, the American public is not surprised to find culinary professionals anywhere and everywhere. Few television viewers, in fact, were probably taken aback when Puck - whom Robin Leach of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'' calls the most famous chef in America - was portrayed on an episode of "The Simpsons." Scott Feldman, whose New York-based Two Twelve Management & Marketing firm represents several of the country's elsa peretti prominent chefs and restaurateurs, says this sea change is something the industry had hoped for many years to achieve."This category, this genre has been embraced as part of the fabric of our country," he says, "and when you start to see the transcendence [of cooking professionals] into popular culture, you have to say this is phenomenal. It's not just about food and drink. People are buying into it as a piece of lifestyle."This tectonic shift in cultural perception has resulted in the sweeping chef-as-a-brand phenomenon, which is enabling a growing number of talented culinarians to expand their influence beyond the four walls of their restaurants."Now it can be about having a brand name," Feldman says, "about doing brand extensions and building a bigger portfolio of assets."Gordon Hamersley, owner of the 20-year-old Hamersley's Bistro in Boston, says the cult of celebrity chef in America has frank gehry the restaurant industry."When I entered the business in the 1970s, the choices for chefs were limited," he says. "You could be a chef in a restaurant or a hotel, or maybe own your own restaurant. Now food is so central to a certain portion of the American public, we see chefs coming out of their kitchens and doing other things. The possibilities are endless."
The 46-year-old Mr Obama is just too green about the gills for the highest office in the land, Mr Young argued, and lacks a network of political allies that could sustain him in times of trouble. "To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion," he said. But he could not resist adding a kicker. "Bill [Clinton] is every bit as black as Barack--he's probably gone with more black women than Barack."Mr Young's faux pas is a tiffany money clip sale symptom of the Clinton campaign's troubles. Mrs Clinton's commanding leads in the make-or-break states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have evaporated. And the much-vaunted Hillary machine is looking, for the moment at least, more Heath Robinson than Vorsprung durch Technik. The bad news keeps coming, and even the good news has a way of turning bad.
Mr Obama is proving to be Mrs Clinton's perfect nightmare. He has not only neutralised her most compelling claim for attention--the first black president is a more momentous prospect than the first woman president. He has also shaped the race. His early entry into the contest forced Mrs Clinton to declare her candidacy sooner than she had planned. His fund-raising prowess forced her to make much more use of her husband tiffany necklace sale she had intended. Last weekend stadium-sized crowds turned up to watch Oprah Winfrey, the only woman in America who can turn "Anna Karenina" into a bestseller, stumping for Mr Obama. Mrs Clinton was reduced to touring Iowa with her daughter, Chelsea, and her mother, Dorothy.
Mrs Clinton's problems have forced her to abandon the high horse of inevitability for the boxing ring. Yet so far she has proved to be no great shakes as a pugilist. She excused her poor performance in a debate in Philadelphia by accusing her fellow (male) candidates of "piling on". This feebly suggested that she wanted to be given special treatment because of her gender. Then she threw a succession of wild punches that made her look like an amateur. The Clinton campaign's decision to dredge up the fact that Mr Obama had written an essay in kindergarten on how he wanted to be president was particularly misguided. What tiffany pendant sale of person quotes a kindergarten essay against a rival?
Mrs Clinton's recent troubles have raised questions about what is arguably her most important selling-point, her competence. The Clintonistas have always presented her as a woman who is "tough enough" to deal with anything that is thrown at her--trained in the Clinton wars of the 1990s and always ready with a counter-punch. She is certainly one of America's most accomplished practitioners of the politics of personal destruction. But the skills that she perfected behind the scenes seem to be far less effective when they are practised in the limelight.Same old dirty politics
Mrs Clinton's troubles have also reminded people of what they most tiffany ring sale about the politics of the Clinton-Bush era. "She's run what Washington would call a textbook campaign," Mr Obama argues. "But the problem is the textbook itself." This is self-serving: all campaigns employ the dark arts of polls, story-planting and character assassination, and Mr Obama is no exception. But Mrs Clinton is vulnerable to the charge that she uses them more than most. She is surrounded by veteran pollsters and lobbyists from her husband's administration. She seems to delight in political warfare--"Now the fun part starts," she stupidly declared about her battle with Mr Obama. And her campaign seems addicted to spin. Mr Clinton did his wife no favours when he recently declared, despite evidence to the contrary, that he had opposed the Iraq war from the start.
Mrs Clinton's style inevitably raises questions about her character. Discuss her with voters and the same words keep cropping up--"disciplined", "robotic", "cold", "scripted", "calculating" (if childhoods are to be invoked, even her mother once said that "she just does tiffany accessories sale she has to do to get along and get ahead"). Large numbers of voters regard her as slippery and untrustworthy. This inevitably raises questions about her electability. Mrs Clinton sometimes manages to lose in head-to-head polls against leading Republicans, despite a tidal wave of anti-Republican sentiment. A recent Gallup poll showed that, with 47% of people favourably disposed to her and 50% unfavourably disposed, she had the highest "negatives" of any candidate in the race, Democratic or Republican. Those negatives are particularly high in swing states such as Colorado.
The richer and more influential members of the college [of cardinals] summoned others to their presence. Seeking the papacy return to tiffany sale themselves or their friends, they begged, made promises, even tried threats. Some threw all decency aside, spared no blushes and pleaded their own cases, claiming the papacy as their right. . . . Each [of them] had a great deal to say for himself. Their rivalry was extraordinary, their energy unbounded. They neither rested by day nor slept by night.
Ah, the ironic distance of the true intellectual! The only problem with this familiar narrative is that Piccolomini was describing his own election as Pope Pius II. Let us grant that Pius II was not among the nobler popes, and that there is irony not just in his narrative style but in the name he chose on his election to the Holy See: It remains the case that citizenship in the republic was compatible, and understood to be compatible, with almost any attitude toward tiffany necklaces on sale we now call "organized religion."Grafton freely acknowledges this fact, and, for someone interested in the intellectual history of Western religion, one of his more interesting chapters is on the Jesuits, many of whose members possessed citizenship in the learned republic and who, added together, cover the whole field of options in relating faith to learning.
If there is any historical period likely to be associated with the Republic of Letters, it is die eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment: Consider in this light of the tide of Dena Goodman's 1996 book The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the tiffany pendants on sale Enlightenment or the work of Robert Darnton, which consistendy sees the RepubUc of Letters as finding its fullest flowering and best home in eighteenth-century France. Yet Grafton sees this era as the one in which the Republic of Letters "reached its natural end," and neidier Voltaire nor any of the other luminaries of the various enlightenments (Kant, Hume, Diderot) are considered in Worlds Made of Words. Grafton silendy passes over this extraordinary period in European intellectual history in order to deal with certain developments diat he sees as the modern heirs of the republic: the rise of the discipline of intellectual history, the emergence of the "public intellectual," the recent creation of vast digital libraries. (The heirs are manifesdy inferior to their great predecessors, but Grafton writes about them incisively.)
Since Worlds Made by Words is not an argument but a collection of essays and reviews about the republic, this is one of the places where we are left to piece together the parts of the story that Grafton chooses not to tell. Why does he think that the RepubUc of Letters died during the period that others see it at its peak?There's one suggestion: the replacement of Latin by French as the official language of die repubUc. Grafton does not expUcidy deplore this, but, especiaUy in one essay on Renaissance Latin and its decline, he shows die virtues of a scholarly community built around Latin. Not only did it provide a universal language tiffany rings on sale with no particular existing culture or polity, but it also, through its arcaneness, created a linguistic space in which matters of great delicacy could be explored and debated. Scholars who wouldn't have dreamed of talking about sex in their native tongues wrote of it freely in Latin.
But I dunk- though I am not sure that Grafton would agree- that this story suggests another reason for the decline of die republic. If you take Grafton's view, the republic flourished from the fifteendi through die seventeenth centuries and then declined; if you take die more familiar view, it flourished in die eighteenth century and then declined. But all agree that it had effectively ceased to function by the nineteendi century.Is it purely accidental dut this decline and fall followed so closely after Voltaire and his allies enlisted die republic in a campaign against organized religion? If there is any one figure we are likely to associate tiffany accessories on sale die French Enlightenment, it is Voltaire, and if there is any one belief dut we are likely to associate with Voltaire, it is bis insistence that the task of the philosophe is to Ecrasez l'infame- crush die infamous one, the Church- even diough he knew perfecdy well that in more violent times the system of dual citizenship had worked quite well for multitudes of scholars.
But as A.D. Nuttall points out in a book mat borrows its tide from Browning, the figure from whom Eliot drew her character's namedie great sixteenth-century humanist and scholar Isaac Casaubonwas anything but dry as dust At die end of a day spent wholly in reading, he would write in his diary Hodie vixi ("Today I have lived"), but he could also complain of the "lifelessness" of his existence when he was separated from his wife and their nineteen- yes, nineteen- children. He was energetic in other realms as well, prodigiously learned in die whole of Greek literature and philosophy and in the Church Fadiers; he edited the ancients' manuscripts and wrote immense commentaries on them. A Huguenot he spent much of his career in Geneva, but the fair-mindedness of his patristic scholarship in an age of bitter tiffany bracelets on sale led many to suspect him of Catholic leanings. Late in his life he moved to England and seems to have found the Anglican way deeply congenial to his temperament.
As Andiony Grafton explains in his fascinating new book, Worlds Made of Words, Isaac Casaubon's passion for learning combined with scrupulous scholarly integrity made him an exemplary member of die Republic of Letters- a loose, freeform, international community of scholars diat began in the later fifteenth century, more or less. The name, Respublica Litterarum, is as old as die community, and indicates its aspirations to egalitarianism- or rather meritocratism, since, ideally anyway, one earned membership by intellectual and social virtue rather than by being scooped under the wing of any sort of sovereign. The community had a "strict code" of ethics: "Write to another scholar and you engaged yourself to reply to future letters in reasonable time, to give credit to your correspondent for information received and tiffany cufflinks on sale accepted, and to call him or her a friend- a term diat had a strong formal meaning."
The maintenance of such propriety was, if necessary, not a sufficient condition for citizenship:Any young man, and more than a few young women, could pay die pnce of admission. If they mastered Latin and, ideally, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic; became proficient at what now seem the unconnected skills of mathematics and astronomy, history and geography, and physics and music; visited any recognized scholar . . . bearing a letter from a senior scholar, tiffany earrings on sale E-eeted their host in acceptable atin or French, they were assured of everything a learned man or woman would want: a warm and civilized welcome, a cup of chocolate (or, later, coffee), and an hour or two of ceremonious conversation on the latest editions of the classics and the most recent sightings of the rings of Saturn.
If this sounds like the platonic ideal of the scholarly life, Grafton means it to: Though he shows the varying ways tiffany money clips on sale citizens of the republic betrayed its idealsthrough competitiveness, selfaggrandizement, polemical exaggeration, religious partisanship, and general dishonesty- there's no question that he believes the Republic of Letters one of the sweetest and most delightful forms of human community ever invented, and he mourns its passing.
As well he should. One way to view the republic, Grafton says, is "as a sort of Pedantic Park- a world of wonders, many of them manmade, inhabited by scholarly dinosaurs." Indeed: There were giants on the earth in those days.A collection of essays and reviews on a more-or-less common theme, Grafton's Worlds Made by Words does not form a consecutive argument. Though some of the essays are brilliant and none are less than interesting, the inevitable spottiness of die history it lays out is frustrating at times. A significant number of the early republicans were, like Casaubon, Huguenots of the Reformed persuasion and tiffany key rings on sale opposed to much Catholic teaching and to papal authority. This resistance to the prevailing religious authority of their world seems fitting to many of us moderns: That persons egalitarian and meritocratic in matters of scholarship would hold similar views in matters of religion makes sense. The ideal citizen of the republic, beyond any question, is Erasmus, who famously had at best an ambivalent relation with die formal structures of the Catholic Church.And consider this other representative (though far less famous) figure: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, a humanist scholar from Siena who wrote in polished and incisively witty Latin about the election of die pope
As a woman who had set her sights on finding á man - Harris, after all, went on two reality shows to find a mate (before The Bachelorette, she tried to win Jason Mesnick's heart on The Bachelor) - Harris was perhaps susceptible to being deceived. "You could tell her something and she'd just buy in because that's how she deals with people," says Kovacs. "She trusts people to a fault and that's her downfall."Indeed, when Swiderski left fnidseason and returned later, dramatically declaring, "I realized that I made a huge mistake," his fellow castmates questioned his intentions. "When he came back, I was very surprised, because I didn't return to tiffany he was very interested," finalist Reid Rosenthal tells Us.While Harris was oblivious to Swiderski's antics, some contestants had a feeling he was bad news. "There was definitely something, I can't put my finger on it, where I did think, I'm not going to be best friends with this guy," Michael Stagliano tells Us. "Ed's a shady character." Seconds Rosenthal, "Some people didn't care to hang out with him." Adds Wes Hayden, who was accused of having a girlfriend while on the show, "Dave [Good] and I both remember Ed saying he had a girlfriend, but we are not the kind of guys who are going to run our mouths."
Still, Harris pals insist she's no patsy for seeing the good in Swiderski - and for sticking with him. "I tiffany jewelry on sale think she's turning a blind eye or playing dumb," says Brad Bell, who's been friends with Harris for seven years and admits the Bachelorette does have a thing for bad boys. "She's not naive, but she's going to support you and give you the benefit of the doubt. I know she would have talked to him about it, confronted the situation and dealt with it."
And show creator Mike Fleiss tells Us that discovering skeletons in each other's closets is normal in any relationship: "They'll go through some s-t like everybody else. Can you imagine - forget the TV show - getting engaged to somebody who you've only known for two months? It takes a few years to come clean."
Harris has a stand- ing offer from John- son to expedite the discovery process where Swiderski is concerned. "I I would welcome the chance to talk to her," says John- son, "to tell her what happened and answer any questions she has." Her offer was posted tiffany somerset Usmagazine .com August 7. As of presstime, Harris had not reached out to Johnson, but she has slammed his exes as women who will do "the craziest things in order to ... get their 15 minutes [of fame]." (In fact, both have returned to their lives and declined further interviews.) Harris also said, "I feel very sorry for the girls who are brokenhearted because I know how that feels. The way that they have dealt with it, to bring up things from the past that don't apply to my relationship with Ed, it's making them, I believe, look a little foolish."
While Bachebrette contestants have their own ideas about how Harris should handle her relationship with Swiderski - "She needs to dump him!" says Kovacs - Harris isn't heeding their advice. She is moving forward with her plans to relocate to Chicago "in the beginning of September," she told The Province, adding that the situation "made us stron- ger and it's only made us communicate with each other more." Swiderski shared the sentiment, telling Stagliano, "We're going to get through it."And while Bachelorette host Chris Harrison told Us August 8 he didn't ask Harris whether she believed her fiancé cheated ("I didn't ask her because I tiffany 1837 want to know"), Harris told him of Swiderski, "? still love him more than any man I ever have in my life.'" Harrison believes they've even set a wedding date. But Harris pal Renee Simlak, a fellow contestant on Mesnick's season of The Bachelor, says the situation has opened up Harris' eyes - if just a little. "I'm sure she's being cautious. She is a very smart girl and she definitely doesn't want to be screwed over."
ALAS, POOR Casaubon! Your name, thanks to George Eliot has become a byword for dryasdust pedantry and pseudomonastic self-absorption. The creaky scholar of Eliot's novel Middlemarch is so devoted to his work eternally in progress, die Key to AU Mythologies, that he barely seems tiffany bangles on sale notice diat he has married a lovely and ardendy gifted young woman- and, not incidentally, has thereby ruined her life. He's die perfect caricature of the scholar, "dead from the waist down," as Robert Browning said. Almost everyone who reads Middlemarch pictures Casaubon as a doddering old greybeard, diough, in fact Eliot makes it clear that he is solidly middle-aged. He just seems to have been bom old.
And though Harris, 29, a Vancouver-based restaurant designer, admitted in an August 6 interview with her hometown newspaper. The Province, to briefly "tearing up" over Us' story, she has since plastered on her best prime time-worthy smile and proudly declared she's standing by her man. Notably, standing by her man. Notably, she's dismissed her fiance's infidelity as "nonsense" and "inaccurate" - even in the face of photographic evidence and racy e-mails and texts that Swiderski sent the two other women ("Bring beer and condoms," he texted Steffen postengagement on June 3). "I am not affected by this at all," Harris breezily told The Province. "We really plan on trying to get out of the limelight and trying to get on with our lives." But Bachelorcite insiders tell Us Harris may not know the kind of person her fiancé really is.
As on many reality shows, Bachclorrette contestants are made to atlas jewelry cellphones and laptops, cutting off contact with the outside world to keep interaction lively among the participants. But Swiderski was the exception to the rule. "There was a special arrangement," eastmatc Jesse Kovacs, who says the men on the show were aware Swiderski had a computer and a phone, tells Us. "He had an agreement because it was imperative for him to have access for work."
Or so they thought. While Swiderski may have fired offa few interoffice e-mails, he also kept in close contact with Johnson, whom he had told he was only going on the show for fun, and later told he was not attracted to Harris. "I miss you dearly. I love you. . . . Hopefully they'll get me home tomorrow," he e-mailed Johnson April 12, three days before he told Harris hehadtoleavetheshow to focus on his career and calling the decision to bow out "one frank gehry the hardest things I've ever done." Says Kovacs, Obviously, no one knew he was saying, Tm not into her and I can't wait to go home.'"
That's because Swiderski did a fine job of portraying himself as a serious career- minded fellow who never boasted about sexual con- quests. "If he talked about anything, it was work and what he did, how he got into it," says Kovacs. Agrees contestant Mathue Johnson, "He seemed like a workaholic." Which is how he presented himself to Harris too, even telling her on camera, "Up until now, I've been focusing on my career and not really cushion jewelry on my relationships," and "I have a hard time balancing out my work life and personal life."
In fact, Swiderski seemed to have no problem balancing work as well as three women: Harris, Johnson (whom he had dated for more than a year and who told Us Swiderski had promised to propose marriage by year's end) and Steffen, whom he began dating last December, when he and Johnson hit a rough patch. When Swiderski left the show April 15, he mastered the art of multitasking with his women: spending the night with Johnson on April 16, then Steffen on April 23, and then attending a wedding with Johnson on April 25, where he made out with her on the dance floor. (Both ABC and Warner elsa peretti, which produces the show, had no comment. Swiderski did not return calls for comment.)
As Steffen tells Us, "Ed just has this way of making people believe what he wants them to believe." Johnson, who, like Steffen, found out about his engagement to Harris on television along with millions of other Americans, couldn't agree more. "Ed has a way with words," she says. When she threatened to go public with her story, "he said, 'Lindsey, please do. If it's going to make you feel better to get your side out and the truth out, please tell your story,'" recalls Johnson. "I think he was trying to use reverse psychology on me." Now she wishes Harris would wise up. "Ed is lying," Johnson says of Swiderski, who went on Good Morning America August 5 and denied ploma picasso slept with Johnson a week after proposing to Harris. ("It's actually not true at all," he stated.) "He was cheating on Julian! He was deceiving me the entire time, so can't Julian see that he is deceiving her now? It's really hurtful that Ed won't be truthful about what happened!"