Sunday reading: The Lost City of Rangoon, Christmas-mad China, mad-as-a-hatter GOP

The weekend Financial Times is  always a great read, but this weeks edition is particularly rich, with Thant Myint-U's Forgotten Treasures, a fascinating report on the time-capsule colonial architecture of Rangoon. now Yangon, a remnant fantasy world that could disappear as fast as it's being rediscovered as Myanmar emerges from its long isolation. Elsewhere, we find out that Christmas is becoming a really big deal in China, with the city of Yiwu, self-billed as the "Christmas ornament capital of the world",  now claiming over 600 companies manufacturing holiday decorations.  And in Republicans respond to anger over inequality, we read about the New Feudalists' plan to derail public outrage over increasing U.S. inequality by offering legislation to cut $9 billion over the next decade by closing loopholes that the reliably hallucinatory Newt Gingrich describes as an Obama conspiracy to give food stamps to millionaires.  Apparently, this will distract us from the fact that, over the same coming decade, the cost of the GOP's obsession to extend Bush tax cuts largely benefiting those same millionaires will come in at a somewhat larger  $3.7 trillion.

Things I Learned from David Mamet in Sunday's Financial Times

• Liberals are evil.
• Criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic
• The British are really anti-Semitic
• T.E. Lawrence was really neat, though
• Liberals want Israel to give up Tel Aviv
• Barack Obama has bankrupted America (apparently all those huge Bush budget deficits had nothing to do with it)
• Barack Obama dismantled health care
• Barack Obama weakened America around the world (Bin Laden must be head-over-heels about that - oh, wait . . . )
• Sarah Palin is wonderful. "I am crazy about her." (After reading his FT interview, I think I can understand why.)

Special bonus item I learned about Chicago in this Sunday's Financial Times:

• $100,000 will buy a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment

Weekend Reading: Lady Gaga gets Fryed, Groupon's gag writers, Bikini Waxes, Kissinger's murderous sycophancy, Hunt Lieberson's sublime Berlioz

Some great weekend reading:

Not-So-Odd Couple - This weekend's Financial Times' Lady Gaga Takes Tea with Mr. Fry offers an engaging and enlightening account of the inimitable Stephen Fry's visit with the unsinkable chanteuse.

Kissinger's China - also in the FT, the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, reviews Henry Kissinger's new book On China, and paints a portrait of a brilliant man devoid of any moral sense. In his latest work the chronic enabler of blood-soaked tyrants offers up a whitewashing of Mao's crimes, to which Patten provides an sobering rebuttal.

Over at Business Week, there's a portrait of New Royalist Torquemada Grover Norquist. When even Tom Coburn thinks someone's a dangerous extremist, you know you're dealing with a real piece of work. Also in Business Week, there's a discussion of the relationship of the bikini wax to Brazil's measure of inflation.

On the music front, The Financial Times finds Glyndebourne's Meistersinger flavorless mush, and reports that, after a slew of cancellations of dates earlier this year, including Chicago, Maurizio Pollini was back in top form at a Royal Festival Hall recital that included Chopin, Schumann, and Stockhausen Klavierstücke.

Over at the Sunday New York Times, David Streitfield's Funny or Die: Groupon's Fate Hinges on Words suggests that Groupon's continued success may hinge on its gagwriters - "musicians, poets, actors and comedians" who write the copy that keeps subscribers clicking coupons.

Elsewhere, Zachary Woolfe has a glowing review of the new live recording from 1995 of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's sublime acount of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete , plus a selection of Handel arias, a must-have release that has been topping out my iPod for the past few weeks.

Sunday Reading: Joyce and Svevo in Trieste, Kristoff on China; FT's Andrew on Citizen Kane

It's a new month, and you still have all of your 15 free accesses before the New York Times disappears behind the paywall, so check out Adam Begley's great travel piece on Trieste which recounts the story of the city's greatest writer, Italo Svevo, to whom James Joyce, while tutoring Svevo in English, would read the emerging chapters of Dubliners, and whose great novel Zeno's Conscience was rescued from neglect by the energetic support of Joyce, who is also speculated to have drawn freely on Svevo's character for the creation of Leopold Bloom. Elsewhere, in a single column Nicholas Kristof covers the massive contradictions of China, from brutal repression to astonishing development, and the grave challenges - and opportunities - they present to the United States. Over at the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews eloquently covers the singular achievement of Orson Welle's Citizen Kane.