Farkash, we learn, was raised to be a scholar and loved nothing more than studying in the yeshiva: “There I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden. Completely immersed, beloved by my friends and my teachers.” But when his father dies and his mother gets sick, he is forced to leave school and become an apprentice to a baker. He soon realizes that his new employer is a monster, violent and heartless, who takes all the joy out of Farkash’s childhood. Worst of all, when his beloved mother is on her deathbed, the baker prevents him from going home to see her—a wrong that Farkash struggles all his life to be able to forgive.

Not until the end of the book do we start to understand why the baker might have thought he was doing Farkash a service by teaching him the necessity of toughness. The baker, it turns out, served during World War I with Farkash’s father, a great scholar who enlisted patriotically in the Austrian army. But something happened to him during the war that shattered his spirit, and he was never the same afterward. When Farkash was just 6 years old, he tells Haim, he was summoned to his father’s deathbed to hear about that dreadful incident, and he wants to pass the story along before he dies—but not to his own children, whom he wants to spare its awful burden. Sabato, who is not overly concerned with narrative subtlety, keeps dangling the revelation in front of the reader’s eyes, only to snatch it away: “I still have not told you the painful story about my father … No, no, I cannot do it. The time has not yet come.” Not until the very last pages of From the Four Winds do we get to hear the story, with its unmistakable moral for Jews and Israelis.

From beginning to end, in fact, From the Four Winds is a didactic book. Sabato arranges his story to emphasize the messages he passionately wants to deliver: about the beauty and value of traditional Jewish learning; the dignity of self-sacrifice in a Jewish state; the heroism and suffering of the Jewish past, and the obligations they impose on the present. These are not new ideas, and a reader who has heard them many times before may well resist the wholly unironic way Sabato presents them. But when it comes to stories like Haim’s and Farkash’s, how can irony be enough?

Firefox has updated from the browser window, and the latest version of the 3.5.3 3.5.2 browser open source web browser downloads is now ready.

In firefox has already 3.5.3 four major problems.

And FeedWriter # chromium privilege to upgrade

# address bar line-height Unicode characters through tall cheating

Article TreeColumns hang fragile. pointer

Proof # accident, memory corruption

Some stability problem #Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

Although be download the latest version of, you can also choose to update this version through access the latest options > help. As usual, you can download the latest version download web 3.0.

The news corporation has obtained Irata laboratories, a small society software development studio in San Francisco, the Los Angeles times has learned.

The company is to establish and other procedures for social network, confirmed the agreement we and twitter (see these tweets Irata from laboratory and the chief executive and designer Chris represent Abad d Keith). The terms were not disclosed.

As you probably know, tomorrow, facebook began f8 developer conference in San Francisco. We will continue to cover what happened, but it looks like a large amount of information, all have the face masks, and GigaOM good comment on what we can have might expect. We report a heap of the announcement of such as these may Bar, "clone - Meebo me as" button, auto - logins Internet connection masks.

Obviously, I was interested in any place may make an announcement tomorrow, but it's not clear if makeup will announce anything as their plans have been fluid, and may not curdle. I'm interested in public figure to talk about operas plan. This is the first time in October 2002, preview vague intentions seems clear makeup, I was: make the entire site tributary system. It may be huge, or another huge network privacy of the disaster.

These magnificent plan is great, but when I sit here last night, I found myself f8 things is very simple: why use face frustration I die?

Microsoft's Windows and launch activities for some of the proposal. As you probably know, it is registered as a Windows and launch party. There are many reviews and articles written in Windows and so far with positive feedback.

This is another great opportunities to learn more about the window. In October 2009 will start at 1:7, Microsoft corp. Offers free webinar there can get answers on the window.

This is a good chance that you can meet the team, with Windows lovers, establish development team cooperation in production system, configuration, deployment, hard, commissioning, testing, and modify the new platform, through all possible situations.Office 2007 download is on sale now!

You can register for this window (free) summit in July 7 webinar Windows online registration page summit.

Directly from the crap department: a recent survey found that male and female 1,500 people have a iPhone than those who do not. A woman who has a special rejection, this research also before hand.

Ok, I do, the second part, but the first part is composed entirely.

According to the survey results, which is held by mobile phones, Internet retailers and other 4u iPhones (telephone), so indifferent in any way, you look at it, 54 percent of women said they would be more easily, if he has a man dating an apple. Which type, it is not clear.

Update: this research may not actually hold, or at least not through the telephone company claims, 4u. Read the entire background.

The United States may have missed its chance to play Spain in the World Cup final Sunday (and the Netherlands in the semifinal, and Uruguay in the quarterfinal), but similar battles take place every day on American turf, where the world meets for pick-up soccer games. There’s weekdays outside an MIT building in Cambridge, weekend mornings behind the White House, and barefoot on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. There are, in fact, times when the U.S. can outrun Ghana and Mexico gets its second goal against Argentina (as long as El Salvador brings the ball, India packs the cones, and Ivory Coast remembers his cleats).

There aren’t many places in the world where such diverse groups organically come out to play, but they are growing in number across the country. Currently, one in eight Americans is foreign-born, and of them, 85 percent are spread throughout the largest 100 metropolitan areas. Although longstanding gateways like New York and Los Angeles received about one in five net immigrant gains between 2000 and 2009, foreign-born populations are growing fastest in smaller places like Jackson, MS and Nashville, TN.

With the growth and dispersion of the foreign-born population (particularly from Latin America and Africa), the notion of soccer as a white suburban sport is changing. Indeed, a majority of the nation’s immigrants live in big metropolitan suburbs. As Alan Berube has illustrated, the fastest growing foreign-born population is from Africa, and most of that group’s members are settling in suburbia.

And that may be the key that marks the long heralded, but never materializing, evolution of soccer into more than just a participant sport here. Two Saturdays ago, a record-setting 19.4 million viewers tuned in to ABC and Univision to watch the U.S. squad lose to Ghana in extra time. That’s more than this year’s NBA finals or the 2009 World Series, according to the L.A. Times. (Granted, it got about one-fifth of the attention that Super Bowl XLIV did, but…)

Last week we reported about their Windows XP mode for MSDN and technet user profile. Earlier, Microsoft has promised released Windows XP mode for public come back.

But when you download XP mode, to ensure that your system support XP mode, we'll check your CPU supports Windows XP mode of instruction.

Once you have installed Windows XP mode, click the button, and then choose window > > 7 all the procedures of virtual computer Windows XP mode to start the installation.

Earlier today, there are many of the video, make makeup meta playback on their website. Of course, it also makes facebook video playback browsers also in iPad and apples. More important, it will be another heavy blow, adobe flash format. The only problem? These video message doesn't use meta.Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

Yes, the film on Facebook click when playing iPad or apples from ReadWriteWeb, but only that, this is through a h264 player (itself), and iPad support is not the real any kind of meta development. We have proved that the message said, "you are right, it is not the HTML. All new film 5 in h264 encoding, so we play video iPad born because it support h264 - encoded video."

WePay, entrepreneurship, is to help with painful mangaing management group such as fraternities, soccer, has won great new hire: Mr Lerdorf, this man PHP programming language. Lerdorf, yahoo last November, will take the lead in the development of WePay API. API will begin to have a decimal purpose developers summer (you can via E-mail inquiries to API@wepay.com).

WePay platform is used to promote pay, you often have to raise enough money from many individuals are not like PayPal (1-1 - to trade system more common). Clerico founder bill said, so far, has made many services and fraternities, traction, also with a roommate often catch on the share bills. Since launching a month ago, Clerico said trade has increased by 50%.

We have covered the test. If your computer will run Windows XP pattern characteristics of SecurAble 7 tool use. May also tool from Intel and AMD xp-compatible test mode.

Since most of the end user with Intel doesn't know the tools, AMD Microsoft released Hardware - Assisted virtualization detection tools to see whether you can experience the computer operating mode.Office 2007 Professional can give people so much convenience.

Just download, double click tools to test your PC's compatibility with Windows XP.

There is even a program, store, I know that before UrbanSpoon some. Download and sold millions of interlibrary cooperation, I can safely say that I was right. Now the united team, they are trying to capture magic at its new freedom iPad applications.

Outwardly, UrbanSpoon for iPad doesn't look as useful, because it is for itself. After all, most people don't just show iPad street, they are looking for a restaurant (though some may when 3G version hits, who know). But the choice is a dinner before you leave the house by UrbanSpoon, and that is iPad is perfect.

Yesterday, we noticed that, in a recent interview in Los Angeles, the singer John mayer sharing his thoughts is "why los pajaritos. Today, in his Tumblr an appropriate title blogs (4), he cleared up.

In his position, called "twitter is not", "I'm fine," mayer about how over-abundance of trace (140 characters) information is limited in the song of the service. This line of thought has launched the calls a few years ago, since no breakthrough. However, he is very nice, "find a stranger in 140 characters had said about you is like a book without established mathematical equations, the value of" x ". Who are you, stranger?"

But what is more interesting meyer does next. He gave a huge, wet kiss another Tumblr service: micro - disappointed.

By the end of last month, many websites that very early Fennec building, mobile robot is downloadable, the mobile phone. However, it is not officially establishing personal together, to a robotic device. Today, the window itself has been out of work Fennec pre construction shall be, at least in the robot and link.

Window is quick to point out that, it is a kind of pre built browser, is only for the purpose of the test. But this is not Vuki evi desc desc President vladimir pull parked in his blog is announced. "Also have no any night developers building automation or automatic update this build; it is more a nightly pre-alpha - built (even earlier. But, it many use, we want to find some enough feedback, because we continue," he said.

But there are other, subtler costs to the proliferation of little governments. They are often simply too fractured to develop a unified vision for economic development, and mobilize regional stakeholders to realize it. Such divisions will always complicate efforts to carry out cross boundary visioning, plan cooperatively or coordinate decision making across large areas. Research shows that metropolitan fragmentation exerts a negative impact on competitiveness and weakens long-term regional economic performance.

The upside of the impending local fiscal crisis is that it may encourage voters to take a second look at how much their beloved local governments are costing them. The effects of the recession on local budgets, as Mark Muro has pointed out, is going to be brutal. Note the use of the future tense – the crisis hasn’t yet reached its nadir, which the National League of Cities predicts will be sometime in 2011.   This means service cuts, furloughs, and layoffs are in the future for most municipalities if they continue on their present course.

One option is to share services to save money: Consolidating just one town and county police force in New York, for example, could save $1.7 million a year – or a 20% reduction in costs for the town, without sacrificing services. The Westshore Regional Fire District in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, could save taxpayers $1.3 million a year.

A bolder step is to dissolve some of the smallest municipalities altogether. A proposal to eliminate Indiana’s 1008 townships altogether has struggled to gain traction in the state legislature and is dead for this year. But incremental changes are still possible elsewhere. A new law in New York allows voters to use a petition drive to start the process of consolidation or dissolution, bypassing local officials who aren’t generally interested in seeing their municipality, and their jobs, disappear. And on March 16th, voters in three small communities in New York, the Village of Seneca Falls, Village of Port Henry, and the Village of Perrysburg (population 380), will vote on whether to merge with larger towns or counties.

At least once before, little Seneca Falls sparked a massive shift in American life. Maybe this consolidation vote could generate another one.

One might be more prone to ask such questions if one were more attentive to the fact that they are not altogether new. Carr himself quotes T. S. Eliot, who anticipated the courtside BlackBerriers (“strained time-ridden faces/Distracted from distraction by distraction/Filled with fancies and empty of meaning”) in 1935. An English writer once clucked at the unpleasant development that “reading has to be done in snatches”—and that was in 1890. “Prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience”—thus Nietzsche in 1882. Perhaps the difference between 1882 and 2010 is that the conscience about taking the mind’s time is gone. Modernity is nothing if not a long-running speed-up, with the world unceasingly going to the speedier dogs. Much of what Carr notices, or fears, was already in play, and accelerating, long before the internet. It was an alarmed and anti-modern Henry Adams who first pondered the idea of “the acceleration of history” way back in 1907—though arguably the history of today is spinning its wheels.Microsoft Office is my best friend.

Carr would no doubt respond that a repeated alarm is not necessarily a false alarm, and he would be right. There is good reason, after all, why we are living through something of a backlash against the frenzy of attention dispersion, a backlash for which Carr’s book will become canonical. The tech engineer-promoter Jaron Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality,” has a book out called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, denouncing “the hive mind” of the internet and declaring that the “widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.” Even old-school capitalists object to the new dispensation, although not always for Carr’s reasons. In another recent book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, the business journalist Ken Auletta catches media mogul Barry Diller recalling that at a meeting with Google co-founder Larry Page, Page “did not lift his head from his PDA device.” “It’s one thing if you’re in a room with twenty people and someone is using their PDA,” Diller told Auletta. “I said to Larry, ‘Is this boring?’” “No. I’m interested. I always do this,” said Page. “Well, you can’t do this,” said Diller. “Choose.” “’I’ll do this,’ said Page matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his handheld device.” That’s new-media power for you—the power to offend Barry Diller.

So Carr, however loud his tocsins, is worth attending to. I am not the only professor these days who has a pretty good idea what the fidgety fingers of students are doing as they ostensibly take notes, and, having watched a graduate student clicking the keys for inordinate periods of a seminar during a whole semester, I am on the verge of banning laptops from my classrooms. The arts of contemplation have been hard to practice for centuries, but that is no reason to make them any harder.

So Carr, alert as well as alarmed, confronts himself as well as his reader with the classic smoke-fire problem. His alarms come clanging on almost every page. What to make of them? They cannot be dismissed as the mutterings of an obsolescent graybeard—Carr is in his early forties. To his credit, moreover, he pauses to address some objections to his line of argument—for example, the striking, well-established finding that IQ scores almost everywhere have been rising for a century while the means of distraction have been multiplying exponentially. “If we’re so dumb,” he italicizes, “why do we keep getting smarter?” Office 2007 is so powerful.

But we don’t, Carr argues—at least not in any simple way. The notion that smartness comes in a single variety is too crude. The testing signals are actually mixed. Some skills have increased as computers spread, but “tests of memorization, vocabulary, general knowledge, and even basic arithmetic have shown little or no improvement.” Worse, there are some recent signs of loss. While math scores have held steady over the past decade, verbal scores have declined. Between 1992 and 2005, something called “literary reading aptitude” dropped 12 percent. A testing skeptic might doubt the worth of any such findings, but it does seem to be the case that something real is being measured, and that whatever it is, it is slipping. Clumsy statistics are not foolproof evidence, and neither are the dumbing-down anecdotes any reader can supply. But they are not nothing. 

Unfortunately Carr does not entertain the possibility of unexpected gifts from the internet. He does not ask whether associational thinking—thinking that leaps horizontally, connecting dots that previously were segregated or “siloed”— might actually benefit from the non-stop multitasking in which one’s center of consciousness is constantly intruded upon by fragments of periphery. Could it be that the great electronic torrent of bits, bytes, and buzz does not only turn all minds into short-term data dumps, but also might promote the creative discerning of patterns where none were evident before? This strikes me as an unanswerable question but not a worthless one, even though it can only be properly asked if one reverts to weasel-word qualifiers.

Pinker's description of earlier fears about the dangers of newspapers, paperbacks, and television as "threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber," like his belief that a rise in "I.Q. scores" somehow offset or discredited earlier anxieties about what television, transistor radios, and rock videos were doing to people's sensibility and consciousness sounded tone-deaf to me.

When it came to new mass-circulation newspapers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, leading critics like E.L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, thought its worst offense was "that its pervading spirit is one of vulgarity, indecency, and reckless sensationalism; that it steadily violates the canons alike of good taste and sound morals; that it cultivates false standards of life and demoralizes its readers." In the 1940s and '50s, critics on the Left perceived similar destructive forces in new forms of mass-produced entertainment. Dwight Macdonald spoke for writers associated with The Partisan Review and his own magazine Politics when he warned that "the deadening and warping effect of long exposure to movies, pulp magazines, and radio can hardly be overestimated."Many people like Microsoft Office.

Pinker closes his piece by praising Twitter and e-books and online encyclopedias for "helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales." ("Manage, search and retrieve"—when, I asked myself, had thinking taken on the character of an army reconnaissance mission?) "Far from making us stupid," Pinker triumphantly concludes, "these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart." In disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as "keeping us smart")—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two. I had recently been reading some stirring essays in defense of the humanities and reading Pinker made me think of the kinds of losses that worried the great literary scholar Harry Levin back in 1954, the supposed golden age of the humanities: "This is the heyday of reprints and anthologies, not to speak of digests and abridgments. ... It may be that a commendable zeal for widespread literacy has somehow ended by spreading it too thin, with a resulting cultural inflation." I was interested to find that Levin was also troubled by mass culture. He pointed to the ever-increasing popularity of picture magazines like Life, of television and the phonograph, and worried aloud that "we are moving so quickly into the audio-visual epoch that the reading habit itself is seriously jeopardized."

In her lecture, our poet-friend expressed similar reservations about the fate of what remains of the reading habit in our digital era. She was also alert to another kind of loss, more elusive, having to do with a sense that the world we have on our computer screens lacks physical, tangible materiality and that it is changing the feel of our lives in unpredictable ways. Her observation has been much on my mind as I read in newspapers and magazines almost daily about the end of the book as we know it, how convenient it will be to download and read "content" on inert, blank screens with names like Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad. I recoil at this consumerist approach to books as immaterial content to be consumed. For me, books, like paintings, are tangible manifestations of a mind,