Many of my all-time favorite novels have a common (if slightly unsettling) thread: They feature an unreliable narrator at the helm. The term was popularized in the 1960s by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth, but the unreliable narrator herself has been around at least as long as the Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales. An unreliable narrator is one who tells a tale with compromised credibility, whether the narrator herself understands that or not. The reader usually finds this out only slowly, as cracks in the narrator's version of events begin to appear.
Broken and non-functional traffic lights hang over an intersection in Atlantic City, N.J., on Monday.
Credit JIM WATSON / AFP/Getty Images
Raymond Souza carries away a ladder after boarding up a gift shop on the boardwalk in Rehoboth Beach, Del. President Obama and Gov. Romney have cancelled campaign events on Monday in anticipation of the superstorm.
Credit Mel Evans / AP
Rough surf breaks over the beach in Cape May, N.J.
Credit J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Washington, D.C. is bracing for heavy rains and high winds as Hurricane Sandy approaches.
Credit Gerry Broome / AP
Terry Robinson checks on his flooded trailer at an RV park in Kitty Hawk, N.C. as Hurricane Sandy makes landfall on Monday.
Credit Mark Lennihan / AP
Peter Cusack, center, and Mel Bermudez walk their dogs along the Brooklyn waterfront as Hurricane Sandy advances on New York City. The storm forced the shutdown of mass transit, schools and financial markets.
Credit Alex Brandon / AP
Al Daisey walks in the flood water in front of his home in Fenwick Island, Del.
Credit NOAA-NASA GOES Project
A satellite image of Hurricane Sandy as it approaches the East Coast at 10:40 a.m. on Monday.
Credit Andrew Burton / Getty Images
The closed New York Stock Exchange is barricaded with sand bags on Monday. The core of Sandy's force is supposed to hit the New York area Monday night.
Coyotes have moved into the Boston suburb of Belmont, Mass. The Boston Globe says they've lost their fear of humans because people feed them. So, Belmont is training volunteers for coyote hazing. Their job is to harass coyotes — shouting at them, throwing objects their way, even squirting them with water hoses.
In the closely contested battleground state of Florida, the Obama campaign is trying to drive up the number of votes from its base. A key mechanism is the network of black churches throughout the state.
Later this week we'll get another snapshot of the U.S. job market: the last unemployment report before next week's presidential election.
Forecasters expect another sign of slow but steady job growth. Whoever is in the Oval Office next year will have to cope with a sluggish U.S. economy and confront some urgent policy decisions.
Originally published on Mon October 29, 2012 6:42 am
In the closely contested battleground states, each campaign is trying to drive up support from its base. A case in point is Virginia, where the Romney campaign hopes conservative evangelicals will turn out in larger numbers.
A new study released by the World Economic Forum ranks northern European nations at the top when it comes to the size of their gender gap. But one area where the gap is huge is in the percentage of women on company boards; it's less than 15 percent EU-wide. Controversy over what should be done about that — and by whom — is more divisive than ever.
Originally published on Mon October 29, 2012 6:47 am
Hurricane Sandy's full impact on the U.S. economy won't be known for quite some time, though some estimates for possible damage are in the billions. A more immediate economic effect is on the markets, as Wall Street shuts down for at least Monday.