I don’t know much about the special election for California’s 36th Congressional District, but I do know that candidate Dan Adler loves Chinese food. He must, he’s Jewish. It’s like a law or something. Also, THIS AD IS AMAZING. [Via]

“How did people make soup before stick blenders? They are the absolute stone cold nuts. You can fuck up a soup real bad and a stick blender will totally make it presentable. Having a stick blender is like a cheat code for Call Of Duty: Soup.”
 — Is this really a cooking blog by legendary musical curmudgeon Steve Albini? Sure, why the hell not.

You have perhaps heard of the Internet sensation that is the PS22 Chorus? Quick primer:

The PS22 Chorus is an elementary school chorus from Public School 22 in Graniteville, Staten Island (New York). It is composed of 60–70 fifth-graders, and is directed by Gregg Breinberg. Students are assigned to the chorus after an annual auditioning process at the beginning of each school year. PS22 is the largest elementary school in Staten Island which draws students from a wide cross section of ethnic groups and socio-economic levels. The chorus meets twice a week during school hours to practice, and performs throughout the year at school functions, local events, and on special requests.[1] It has been featured on several major national news and music networks after its videos had gained international attention within the popular video-sharing site YouTube.

Indeed. Anyway, this is one of their latest, which is adorable in and of itself, but seems especially sweet since I discovered it thanks to this source. It made me smile, at least.

Sex And The Single Israeli Lady Spy

by Emma Garman

Long before Russia’s femme fatale Anna Chapman fueled countless blog posts and male fantasies, Israel had a female spy whose success in her profession’s dark arts made her one of history’s most notorious honey-traps. Back in 1986, Cheryl Ben-Tov, the former Mossad operative known as Cindy, used her blonde, buxom and very American sexuality to ensnare an idealistic young fugitive named Mordechai Vanunu, condemning him to a fate from which he’s still trying to escape.

Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison for treason after he scandalously revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets to the London Sunday Times, is again making headlines, having expressed his desire to renounce his Israeli citizenship and emigrate. A public relations headache, no doubt, for Israeli government officials, who banned Vanunu from giving interviews, having contact with foreigners and leaving the country. Still, I doubt they’ll be losing that much sleep or hair over it, given the vastly more pressing national issues of the Hamas-Fatah unity government and Dana International back in the Eurovision Song Contest. Ben-Tov, on the other hand, has good reason to worry. Last anyone checked, she was a realtor in Orlando — poetic justice, perhaps, but I wouldn’t blame Vanunu, who spent much of his jail time in solitary confinement, has twice been re-imprisoned for minor parole violations since his 2004 release and who has likely never endured a visit to Disney World, if he didn’t see it as sufficient punishment.

The drama began when Vanunu was a young technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear research center. To his shock he discovered that, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, thermonuclear weapons of considerable destructive power were being developed. Eventually, armed with covertly acquired photographic evidence, including pictures of spherical silver bombs with plutonium cores, he went to London and finalized the details on a front-page Sunday Times article that would sensationally blow the whistle on the tremendous nuclear capability behind Israel’s policy of deliberate ambiguity.

Meanwhile, the Mossad had decided that Vanunu — who has always maintained that his only motivation was to avert a nuclear war — was disillusioned, foolhardy and a dangerous loose cannon. Tracking his movements, in London they carefully plotted how to get him into their custody. In his definitive book on the Vanunu affair, The Woman from Mossad, Peter Hounam points out that this was not a Nazi murderer being hunted, i.e., someone whom the Mossad might feel comfortable violently abducting off the street, but an Israeli citizen likely to attract public sympathy. So they opted for the subtle but oh-so-effective method of sending Cindy, a twenty-something bat leveyha, meaning female assistant agent, after him.

Florida native Cindy — real name Cheryl — moved to Israel as a teenager, married a government intelligence analyst at nineteen, and was identified as a suitable spy by Mossad recruiters soon after her wedding. Two years of intensive training followed: she was taught how to lie, steal, kill, and, most importantly, how to use sex, and the especially the promise of sex, as a powerful weapon. Gordon Thomas, in his book Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, reveals that, for example, Cindy’s tutors would pull her out of bed in the middle of the night, send her on a mission to pick up a tourist at a nightclub then disengage from him outside his hotel, observing her all the while. The lesson: how to sexually entrap a man without him having a clue as to what was going on.

Poor Vanunu certainly didn’t. How could he, when he was the one who approached Cindy on the street near his Covent Garden hotel? Sexy Cindy, who happily agreed to go for coffee and to meet up again the following day, was obviously just an American tourist looking for some fun. In reality, she’d hooked her prey: the only hitch was a directive from then-Prime Minister (now President), Shimon Peres, that the actual kidnap not take place on British soil, so as to avoid breaking any British laws and causing awkwardness with his good pal Margaret Thatcher.

For a girl of Cindy’s skill, this was easy-peasy. She had a sister in Rome, she told Vanunu — why, they should visit her, because only away from the stresses of London, and the Times people constantly breathing down his neck, could their relationship properly flourish, wink wink. Of course, what awaited Vanunu at the Rome apartment was not the consummation of a beautiful romance, but three Mossad agents who jumped him, injected him with a paralytic, and bundled him into an ambulance bound for the coast, where he was put on a speedboat, then a ship to Haifa.

In Gideon’s Spies, former Mossad director Meir Amit says: “The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country.” In this instance Cindy, supposedly, didn’t do more than flirt and kiss — although people who knew her have expressed skepticism about that — but presumably she’d have gone all the way had she deemed it necessary; all women working as Mossad spies must promise they’ll do anything for the sake of a mission. Well, almost anything. Peter Z. Malkin, one of the Israeli agents who captured Hitler’s chief executioner, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina, recalls his team’s deeply pious bat leveyha, Rosa, vowing that she wouldn’t eat pork even if an assignment required it, but that no Jew “was ever burned at the stake” for sleeping with a strange man.

Actually, God is totally down with sexpionage, at least according to the Zomet Institute, an organization dedicated to interpreting Jewish law for modern living. In promoting the kosher-ness of shtupping the enemy, they point to Biblical examples like Yael, wife of Hever, who invited a Canaanite general into her bed, then smashed his brains in with a tent peg, Basic Instinct-style. “Our Sages of Blessed Memory,” says Rabbi Ari Shvat, reassuringly, “elevate such acts of dedication to the top of the Halacha’s mitzvahs pyramid.” (One tiny drawback: becoming a “Valentine Operative” means you’ll never marry a Kohen (a Jewish priest), but frankly, if you’re the kind of slut who’ll have sex on the job, such a man wouldn’t touch you anyway, or as Rabbi Shvat puts it, “these missions may naturally be tasked to women who are already promiscuous.” Win-win!)

So, for Mossad lady spies who do sex for the cause, it’s all fun, games and rabbinical blessings — duly noted. Unless, that is, you’re Monica Lewinsky, and your simple little assignment to procure some Bill Clinton blackmail fodder spirals so unpredictably out of control that you’re ignominiously pensioned off to make handbags and shill for Jenny Craig. Hang on, have I said too much?

For the shiksas who work for the CIA, it’s a different and more prudish story. The Agency’s female operatives are forbidden from having sex with contacts, regardless of the circumstances, and over the years there have been various dismissals for such transgressions, as well as sex discrimination lawsuits from women faced with one rule for them, another for male operatives. Valerie Plame, whose forthcoming series of spy novels will, she promises, explode the bimbo stereotype of female CIA officers, has fiercely denied ever sleeping with a source to obtain intelligence. But it’s probably safe to assume that Plame is contractually obligated to equip her fictional alter-ego with a more flexible set of sexual ethics. And, hopefully, a really cute purse pistol.

As for Mordechai Vanunu, if he succeeds in his wish to finally make his home in a new country — he’s said in the past that he’d like to live in America or Europe — Cheryl Ben-Tov should probably dust off her old purse pistol and disguises. But Cheryl, if it’s any consolation, there will be one place you can go this summer and not feel obliged to keep looking over your shoulder: in the audience of Helen Mirren’s new movie, The Debt, in which Mirren plays a venerated Mossad spy. It’s had stellar early reviews, but something tells me Vanunu won’t be dying to go see it.

Emma Garman’s natural cautiousness and poor people skills would make her a terrible spy. She is on Tumblr, though.

Vanunu photo by Ronald H. Miller, via Wikimedia Commons.

Look down. Can you see your knees? Today’s a Thursday, so then you had better either be south of the 30th parallel north — Shreveport, say! — or “working at home” and totally naked.

Because if you’re in the office, and you work anywhere but the International Society for the Advancement of Shorts, you should go home and change.

The question has even been asked: can a man wear shorts at all, ever, anywhere?

At work, of course, no! Not even on a casual Friday at Casual Friday Inc. On the street, in the city? Well… here is where opinions become complicated.

On a recent spring Saturday afternoon, a clerk at a swank Madison Avenue store was actually grateful to receive a visitor in shorts. “Finally, someone in shorts!” she cried. It was nice out. And it was Saturday. And no one was wearing shorts. Yes, it was prior to Memorial Day. But the shorts were very dignified. Really, they were short trousers, which is to say, they were an actual garment, made by an actual person.

This matters, because the shorts you’re probably wearing, well… get the lighter fluid! Sorry!

Civilized society’s aversion to shorts is in part an opposition to the hideous epidemic of every dude’s current weekend uniform of the baggy cargo shorts. You guys wear these all the time and you look like garbage in a garbage sack in a sea of other identical sacks of garbage. Lazy is as lazy wears. Even if you’re really hot, we’re looking at you then looking down at that sea of brown swimmy gross sackcloth around your business area and we’re writing you off.

Sure, there are those that maintain that shorts can never ever be worn. And Barack Obama almost never wears shorts. Tom Ford says they are only for the beach or the tennis court.

But I’m going to tell you a secret. I enjoy a good expedition in shorts, no matter what the haters say! It’s high spring! Summer is breathing down the back of our knees. Now would be an ideal time for you to take a little cheap shopping expedition to find some comfortable shorts.

A few brief suggestions:

• Why not have a nice pair of garden party shorts, in seersucker or madras? You can wear them ironically at parties in Brooklyn! They should come circa knee-ish. They should be pretty and well-fitting. Also, there is really no such thing as “ironically” wearing shorts. You are in them or you aren’t. We can pretend though. Except when Thom Browne is involved…. I guess it is a bit ironic.

• “Designer” shorts can be unexpectedly tricky. Like, Rick Owens is pushing this, this year.

Yeaaaaah, no thank you.

And yet, these checked Etro shorts? Adorable!

• And of course there are cheap versions of shorts that actually fit or actually look good. Your Target mileage will vary, but aim for something that falls off and isn’t like a utility belt that had intercourse with a feed bag.

Listen, some days we all want to schlump around. But unless you have a laundry bag on your shoulder, there’s no need to actively repel people’s interest in you. Unless you need to do that of course. Some of you — yes you! — are just so stunning that we need to deface ourselves for the public good.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, advertisers do not produce the content. This series/post is brought to you by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

“I know I harp on Rand a lot, but I can’t get over the outsized influence over public life commanded by an utter nutball. If we had prominent members of Congress running around citing the theories of Lyndon LaRouche, people would freak out. That’s the situation we’re in.”
 — The New Republic

‘s Jonathan Chait considers Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s argument that wanting to give everyone health care “means you believe in slavery.”

By now, you will have tried to read Matt Taibbi’s latest, which makes the case, which in my book was already made, that there should be criminal investigations at Goldman Sachs. I say “tried” because this is rough going. (And yes: Matt Taibbi, God bless!) And he’s not wrong! Many of us have accustomed ourselves over the last few years to reading about regulatory whatnots and tranchey thingamabobs, and while it’ll always be an uncomfortable second nature, at least writing about financial instruments follows some rules. But it’s not the finance that’s hard. For one, there’s sentences like this one: “Each of the deals appears to represent a different and innovative brand of shamelessness and deceit.” Now, I’m sorry the legal department made you say “appears to,” even though it is technically accurate that we only know for sure that there is an appearance of deceit. But the helpful analogies!

Goldman isn’t a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it’s an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn’t left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes.

It is not at all like that.

Goldman was like a car dealership that realized it had a whole lot full of cars with faulty brakes. Instead of announcing a recall, it surged ahead with a two-fold plan to make a fortune: first, by dumping the dangerous products on other people, and second, by taking out life insurance against the fools who bought the deadly cars.

True-ish: it is indeed a little like that?

When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

Okay, it is really definitely not like that.

This is kind of like taking all the kids who were picked last to play volleyball in every gym class of every public school in the state, throwing them in a new gym, and pretending that the first 10 kids picked are varsity-level players. Then you take all the unpicked kids left over from that process, throw them in a gym with similar kids from all 50 states, and call the first 10 kids picked All-Americans.

It is maybe like that but now you’ve mingled sports and finance and childhood shame and I don’t knoooowww any more….

A tip from a pro: “In this hypertrendspotting environment, you have to be snappy. Once a Williamsburg trend hits the New York Times, it’s only good for laughing at the cluelessness of Manhattanites. The real prize is catching a possible trend in its early stages, before it’s been all picked over. You have to be able to instantly spot and exploit stories like this, in today’s Brooklyn Paper: ‘West Bank proxy battle seen in falafel war on Bedford Ave.’”

Great. The gorgeous, majestic Sumatran tiger is headed for extinction. The video above shows 12 of the remaining 400 of them, playing with leaves and investigating (and at one exciting point, apparently, biting and incapacitating!) a motion-activated video camera the World Wildlife Federation set up in the Bukit Tigapuluh wildlife reserve this past March and April. And this forest — which they obviously like, because it’s rare to record so many of the things over such a short period of time — is scheduled to be cleared for paper pulp. (Paper?! No one even uses that stuff anymore!)

The video contains some repetition; I think by the 2:50 mark you’ve seen all the original footage. I don’t mind, because I could watch this on loop all day. Because Sumatran tigers are so beautiful and majestic. (Though I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack. How about, umm, Brian Eno? I’ll put it below, so you can cue it up and listen while you watch.) Oh, and what do we get to replace these beautiful species that we’re extinguishing from the wild? The hairless, giant-headed Rochester chupacabra. Which apparently doesn’t mind living in the suburbs.

Here is an analysis of how the Daily Mail solves the problem of “how to optimise for the high-volume search term ‘Pippa Middleton’s arse’.” And here you will find an argument that newspapers write about Pippa Middleton’s arse (or, as we have it here, “Pippa Middleton’s ass” or “Pippa Middleton’s rear end” or “Pippa Middleton amazing ass” or “great ass Pippa Middleton” or “Pippa Middleton rump ass bottom backside” or “woman from Royal Wedding ass” — Enough already, we get the joke. — Ed.) because that’s what people want to read about: They want to read about Pippa Middleton’s fantastic ass. Also they want to see pictures or photos. As well they should!