Polls, polls, polls, ne any drop to drink

Obama vs McCain
Clinton vs McCain

Much packing

And rearranging of suitcases occurs continuously.

Ebert

Ebert to Resume Writing Movie Reviews
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 9:29 p.m. ET

CHICAGO (AP) -- Roger Ebert will resume writing reviews later this month, but will not rejoin his syndicated TV show because he's still unable to speak. More

Meanwhile, to move behind faster, CBS...

CBS Moves Ahead With Layoffs in News
By BILL CARTER

News operations at CBS stations in several cities started a series of job cuts this week even as the CBS News network moved ahead with plans to lay off about 1 percent of its nearly 1,200 employees. More

Foodies in South Africa?

Surfacing | Paternoster, South Africa
Cape Town’s Foodie Suburb
By NADINE RUBIN

TWO years ago, Arnold Hoon, a chef from Johannesburg, was driving along South Africa’s West Coast in search of lunch. On a whim, he and his wife, Annelise Bosch, followed an old wooden sign to Paternoster, a traditional fishing village about 90 minutes north of Cape Town.

What they found were whitewashed cottages overlooking Paternoster Bay, and a single restaurant, Voorstrandt (Strandloper Way; 27-22-752-2038), near a beach dotted with fishing boats. Soon, they were dining alfresco on fresh oysters and grilled lobsters, served with a crunchy green salad. “We never left,” said Ms. Bosch, a former actress. More

See can't we

Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face
By NATALIE ANGIER

Leave it to a vision researcher to make you feel like Mr. Magoo.

When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, speaking last week at a symposium devoted to the crossover theme of Art and Neuroscience, wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he naturally turned to a great work of art. He flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We drank it in greedily, we scanned every part of it, we loved it, we owned it, and, whoops, time for a test.

Dr. Wolfe flashed another slide of the image, this time with one of the squares highlighted. Was the highlighted square the same color as the original, he asked the audience, or had he altered it? Um, different. No, wait, the same, definitely the same. That square could not now be nor ever have been anything but swimming-pool blue ... could it? The slides flashed by. How about this mustard square here, or that denim one there, or this pink, or that black? We in the audience were at sea and flailed for a strategy. By the end of the series only one thing was clear: We had gazed on Ellsworth Kelly’s masterpiece, but we hadn’t really seen it at all. More