A house in Key West is the Hemingway Home & Museum because it is where Ernest Hemingway lived in the 1930s when he was often drunk and wrote books of short words. And the captain of a ship gave the writer of spare prose a cat of spare toes and bureaucrats worry about its many-toed descendants and that is the government in action. Click here to read the rest.
When people warn that the United States is approaching a "fiscal cliff" it doesn't take much wit to realize it's not a holiday camp. But what is it and where, why is Uncle Sam whistling insouciantly as he hurtles toward it, and how might he avoid the high jump? Click here to read the rest.
Years ago a friend told me if you never fall down skiing you’re not trying hard enough. I hope it applies to punditry too because I sure got the U.S. election wrong and now have to try to make credible sense of a result I firmly didn’t predict. Click here to read the rest.
It's time for American voters to show their true colours: Red, pink and blue.
Pink? How did that get in there? Simple. If you're trying to understand the American parties' political strategies in the home stretch, or make sense of early results on election night, the colour-coded map you see here shows how American states have voted since Clinton's first election in 1992: Blue means Democratic all five times, bright blue means four times Democratic, pale blue three times, while pink ones went Republican three times, bright red ones four times and red ones were solid GOP the whole way.