Joker

Eames Postage

All-Star Game

Barton Silverman/The New York Times
Chipper Jones and Derek Jeter at venerable Yankee Stadium.
NYTimes:

Across the last 85 years at the Stadium, there has been endless baseball history and, simply, history itself. There have been masses celebrated by Popes, boxing matches featuring the likes of Joe Louis, concerts fronted by Bono and a day for Nelson Mandela. And there have been, of course, those 26 world championships accumulated by the Yankees. Now there is a fourth and final All-Star Game at the Stadium, a signature moment in a final season that will be filled with them.

The game is a reminder to a national audience that it will soon be time to say farewell to a landmark. The American League standings provide more poignancy, since the Yankees are trailing by sizable margins in the division and wild-card races. Unthinkable as it might seem — the Yankees, after all, have been in the postseason for 13 straight years — there may not be any October baseball at the Stadium this season, which means Tuesday night’s game could be the Stadium’s final one on a national stage. “I think that it should steal the attention, rightfully so,” Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, said of the place he has always called home in the major leagues. “This place is as special as it gets.”

On Iraq

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

“What’s missing in our debate about Iraq, what has been missing since before the war began, is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq and its dominance of our foreign policy. This war distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize. This war diminishes our security, our standing in the world, our military, our economy, and the resources that we need to confront the challenges of the 21st century. By any measure, our single-minded and open-ended focus on Iraq is not a sound strategy for keeping America safe.”

Big Sur

Photo: Winston Boyer

New York

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
Traders in the crude oil options pit at the New York Mercantile Exchange. Oil prices spiked above $147 a barrel on Friday.

Nacho Carbonell

"Evolution" lover's seat made from recycled newspaper.

Cut-offs

Photo: Dean Isidro for The New York Times

NYTimes:
Cotton stretch jeans (cut to a seven-inch inseam), $68 at American Apparel; herringbone linen blazer, $795 at Polo Ralph Lauren; Band of Outsiders candy-striped short-sleeve cotton shirt, $185 at Barneys; striped cotton T-shirt, $78, and leather chain belt, $40, both at Marc by Marc Jacobs; skinny nylon tie, $10 at MAP; Cutler and Gross aviator sunglasses, $390 at Selima Optique.

Obama

Marc Ambinder:

Obama's trip to Europe will be a huge event...maybe as big as his convention, maybe as big as a debate. Sheer curiosity will translate into enormous crowds, even as most of Obama's events will be small and pooled. The European press will go ga-ga, uncritically. If Obama does speak at the Brandenburg gate -- and it's unclear whether he will at this point -- you could envision a crowd of more than 200,000 watching and cheering him.

Iran

Sepah News, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Zadar, Croatia

Photo: Carly Calhoun for The New York Times

Sonoma, California

Photo: Matthew Millman for The New York Times

Tower studio.

Independence Day

The Los Angeles Dodgers take the field at AT&T Park, San Francisco, after winning 10-7.
On Saturday, we returned and sat ten rows behind first base. The Dodgers lost that game.

San Francisco

Thursday afternoon

Big Sur, California

A kitHAUS K3
http://www.kithaus.com/