Sometime soon -- say, around Spring 2004, when George W. Bush begins spending his money -- whoever becomes the Democratic nominee may have second thoughts about his attendance at the NARAL dinner in Washington on January 21, 2003.... After the six had delivered their speeches, they sat while Kate Michelman, who had summoned them, gave them their orders: She expects from them no less than a full-throttle filibuster every time George W. Bush names to the federal bench a judge that does not meet her strict standards of purity. Did any of the senators sitting there wince when she said this? Did they think that they might today be in the minority because they had refused to vote on Bush judges? Did they consider what the country might think if they tied up the Senate, perhaps in wartime, to thwart abortion restrictions that most voters favor?The New Republic also has a great piece on the NARAL dinner.
Is the difference between the President and the University of Michigan admissions committee that the members of the admissions committee are acting as agents of the state while the President of the United States is not? That is, is the problem a failure of state action?Is it?
Today's reality contestants may not technically be actors, but their top goal isn't to win a husband, find true love, or even land themselves $50 million. It's to be on television. That is what defines their value system. To draw any conclusions about what men or women are like from these programs is ridiculous--as is believing that contestants' anguished tears, shy smiles, or catty asides are anything other than part of a carefully contrived on-air persona.... But against all reason, there's something about the label "reality TV" that gives these freak shows resonance even with reasonably sane, intelligent people (not to mention most FOX devotees.) All of a sudden people begin to wonder if this really is what women crave deep down.Good point, although I think most people are able to recognize these situations for the contrivances they are.
[A]s of Sunday, after the Super Bowl, a new, revamped "Alias" hits the airwaves. Weekly cliffhangers will disappear and new episodes will be more self-contained, requiring less knowledge of the previous week's episode.I really hope this doesn't ruin the show.
Circumcision for other than religious reasons is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States. It began in the late 19th century and peaked in the 1960's at 90 percent of newborns. Circumcision rates vary widely. They are highest in the Midwest, about 80 percent, and lowest in the West, under 40 percent.All news to me.
The procedure is not common elsewhere. In Canada, the rate is 17 percent and in Britain 5 percent. Elsewhere in Europe, in South America and in non-Muslim Asia, the procedure is rare.
"They ought to call it Jane Big Boobs," he suggests with a grin. "They get a woman with big, fake boobs, have all these guys go after her, and then, in the end, she takes them off and goes, 'Ha! I'm as flat as a f---in' pancake!'"Lovely.
The major problem, as I see it, is that we really don't know how long the war will last, how many people will be killed and dislocated, how many refugees we will create, how many lives we will shorten through sickness and famine, whether we will destabilize other regimes in the Middle East, and whether America's enemies will use our preoccupation to gain advantages elsewhere in the world (think about North Korea, for example).Kitchen Cabinet reader GH responds:
[W]hat war has America fought in the past 220 some-odd years where we did know how long it would last, how many would die or anything else? By the newly proposed "Balkin Doctrine," not only would we never fight another war under any circumstances, we wouldn't have fought any past wars either! There are good cases to be made against war with Iraq, but this is one of the worst attempts yet seen in blogland. Maybe the moral is that law professors should be careful about arguing military strategy?Amidst the barrage of criticism tonight, the Kitchen Cabinet emphasizes that it has the utmost admiration for Professor Balkin, who is deservedly one of the most popular professors at YLS. It's just that none of our other professors are hip enough to have blogs... The day Bruce Ackerman starts blogging is the day we leave Jack Balkin alone!
[W]hat principle allows presidents to take race as one factor among many in nominating Supreme Court Justices but does not allow the University of Michigan to take race as one factor among many in selecting a student body?In response, I'll make the obvious point that presidents are "allowed" to consider a whole host of things in making judicial nominations that we wouldn't consider relevant or appropriate in an undergraduate-admissions context -- whether the president trusts and respects the candidate, whether they have personal rapport, whether the candidate stands a decent chance of being confirmed or of serving for many years, etc.
"Time has a lot of pictures. And, ah, nauseating. It shows. It has a whole strip of pictures of ... " Haldeman says before his boss interrupts to bring up something totally unrelated: praising the "modest dress" of the wives of his Cabinet members, all of whom had come to the White House earlier in the day.I swear, Saturday Night Live couldn't do it any better.
Haldeman seems undeterred, citing the presence in one Time photo of Joan Kennedy, then the wife of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
"The magazine makes the point of showing Joan Kennedy with a slit up to the top of her thighs," Haldeman says. "But they also have a whole strip of pictures of Bernstein kissing everybody he could find and, ah, he's kissing a lot of men on the mouth, you know, including the big black guy. I think it's Alvin Ailey, the head of the dance troupe. And, you know, men kissing men is not... in that world but it is done."
"It is done," says Nixon. "You know the Jews do that."
"But not on the mouth!" shoots back Haldeman.
"He did?" asks Nixon.
"Cheek to cheek, yeah, both cheeks," informs Haldeman.
"Kissing on the mouth?!" asks Nixon.
"Yeah, right head on," says Haldeman.
"Ah, absolutely sickening," responds Nixon.
Haldeman agrees, "It's kind of revolting! Men kissing men on the cheek is a pretty accepted thing."
"Oh, sure," says Nixon.
"The Jews do it all the time. Jews," says Haldeman.
Today the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution denouncing a possible "Kangaroo Jack 2." Coalition forces are set for a Gulf war. The U.S. will provide 260,000 troops, Great Britain will provide 60,000 marines and France will provide four pastry chefs.... I plan on watching the Super Bowl the way I have the past 20 years, at a bar with the Philadelphia Eagles.... The U.S. has a powerful new weapon in the war on terror, a tank, driven by Diana Ross.But back to Hart, who told the WP, "I have an odd appeal to young people.... I've always been underrated. And I live in hope."
Finally, a word about an inevitable part of this process -- rejection. Even experienced law professors at top schools generally get rejections (or silence) from over 90% of the journals to which they submit. I know; I've written over 30 law review articles, half of which were published in top 20 journals, but my submissions still get rejected by the great majority of the places to which I send them.Indeed. No fear. No fear. It's not just a cliche for t-shirts. As my eigth grade math teacher once told me, if you want to run with the big dogs, you've got to jump in the tall weeds.
Rejection is part of the process, and the only way to deal with it is to try to ignore it. Remember that all you need is one acceptance. Remember also that rejections happen for many reasons, and might have nothing to do with the merit of your piece -- for instance, the articles editors might prefer other topics, or might be prejudiced against student-written work.
The worst thing you can do is let your fear of rejection keep you from circulating the article as widely as possible, or recirculating it if it wasn't picked up the first time around. Remember: It's not personal. It's not about you. It happens to your professors all the time. And no-one will know.
They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.Hymowitz's piece offers an excellent summary of all the reasons so few women my age are willing to identify themselves as feminists. The word doesn't mean what it used to mean.
But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.
Of all the people at the football game, the referees are usually the ones in the worst possible position to see what happens.... Why not simply put a TV booth somewhere on the sidelines, and when there's a disputed call, just have the officials run over and see what we're seeing. Then, for the first time, pro football officials will be as knowledgeable as the fans who berate them.And here's Barra in another column, on Terrell Owens:
I don't know if Terrell Owens is the biggest asshole in the history of sports. That's too bold a statement for a world that still contains Scottie Pippen, Bobby Knight and Albert Belle. But I do know that his actions toward the end of the 49ers-Giants game last Sunday were as appalling as anything I've ever seen from a professional athlete on a field of play.... Has anyone ever seen such reckless disregard for his team as Owens showed on that taunting call? The only person I think to have ever topped such behavior was Owens himself just seconds later.Fortunately, thanks to the Bucs, Owens is sitting at home now.
Signing on to Microsoft's Government Security Program will allow Russia, and any other signatory, to weave its own technology into Microsoft's Windows platform and adapt Windows to its needs and test its ability to fend off hackers.Russia, it appears, will get to see Microsoft's sourcecode in exchange for its technological soul.
"Goddammit, Al, I told them I wanted that AID budget cut! It's not the money, it's the personnel. Get those bastards out of there! You got all these young whippersnappers [actual word--Ed.] running around Asia knocking our policies. Get. Them. Out. Of. There."The next conversation involves Len Garment and Nancy Hanks, a hapless member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund who has come to talk to Nixon about the arts. RN starts in on movies:
"Yes, sir!" Haig says. "Should have been done already!"
"I'll tell you, we got to break some china around here. We need hard-headed, tough guys, not this usual State Department way of doing things. All these guys over there--they're weak. They go to these goddamn Eastern Ivy League schools and they're not pro-American."
Kennedy goes on to mention unflattering reports he'd heard about Peace Corps volunteers.
Nixon's feet hit the floor. "Goddamn them, Al! That's another thing I told those bastards to cut! I've never seen a place where the Peace Corps was worth a damn. Am I right? Oh sure, it's great for the kids. They're going to a nice Eastern college, they want a nice little vacation. Well, send them to the goddamn Congo then!"
"Now, Nancy, it turns out, 52 percent of the movies we see here in the United States were made abroad. What I want to do is find a way to keep these damn foreign movies out. Oh, I know they're supposed to be so damn great and so forth. To tell you the truth, I don't see many movies. Saw 'Love Story.' 'Patton.' But my point is, I will not have America slip to number two in the world when it comes to movies.""And there it is," writes Ferguson, "an entire administration in miniature." Nixon never stopped hating "the Eastern Establishment," and they hated him right back.
Mrs. Hanks protests that the popularity of foreign movies is owing to their superior quality.
"Well, then, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take it to the movie industry. You tell 'em, You've got to start producing good movies. Say: No more of this weird stuff! Shape up! The family movie is coming back, you know. People don't like arty. They don't like offbeat. But the film industry, they're trying to reflect the intelligentsia"--the word drips with venom--"and that is their big mistake. Following the intelligentsia is where they always go wrong. Look at these film schools today. All they do is the weird stuff. They produce weird movies. They produce weird people."
But Hanks and Garment have come to talk not about the movies but about the government's grandest current project for the arts, the construction of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Museum on the National Mall.
"Is this going to be some of that--that modern art?" Nixon asks suspiciously.
"It is, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks replies, in her Rockefeller voice. "It's one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world." In the wuld.
"Oh yeah?" Silence. Then: "Don't let it be one of those horrible modern buildings, all right? 'Cause if it is, we're not going to do it."
Garment and Hanks try to explain that the plans have already been approved. Nixon's voice deepens. "I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. If it looks like that, it--will--not--happen." Silence.
"And I don't want 'controversial,' either. All right? Now this list for the board or whatever. Am I stuck with these names?" Garment assures him the list for the museum's board of directors can still be changed.
"Good. I'm taking all the Easterners off of here. Got that? Every single one. And this name--what's--some Harvard name. Know him. Part of the Eastern Establishment. Rich guy, but he'll never lift a finger to help us. Well, the hell with him. Am I right?"
Nixon mentions names of California donors he would like placed on the Hirshhorn board. "Just put 'em on the list," he says. "I mean, why not? Think they'll make the thing a disaster? They can't make it a disaster because it's a disaster already!"
"No, no, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks scolds. "It will not be a disaster!"
"Oh, come on, Nancy," Nixon says quietly. "I've seen the plans."
Another silence. "Well," he says at last, "I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don't have to see it when I look out this window."
The father of Elián González, the Cuban boy at the heart of an international child custody battle in 2000, is on the ballot for Cuba's Parliament in elections on Sunday, along with Fidel Castro, an Olympic track medalist and a popular folk singer.Um, yeah.
Candidates for the 609 seats run unopposed, leading critics to complain that elections on the Communist island are meaningless.
While sucking on a cigarette definitely is bad for your health, numerous non-smokers may find themselves some day being prescribed nicotine patches to combat Alzheimer's disease.But I find it suspicious that this research is being brought to us from "scientists in North Carolina."
Mark Shields: "Now with Gore out, it's pander bear city. The Democrats will be pandering to each constituency, all of them trying to get the McCain mantle and at the same time being the anti-McCain by just caressing all the erogenous zones for the body politic."And the NYT wedding is quite cute today.
David Brooks: "Yeah, but the Republican Party, we actually don't have erogenous zones."
Such is the Darwinian admissions derby for Manhattan's finest private nursery schools. The tykes face the fiercest odds — 15 applicants for every slot is about average. Their parents are people unaccustomed to losing anything, and the search for an edge is ceaseless.Link via Martin Kimel, who has a promising new blog.
Without trust, social life is all but impossible. We walk down the street unarmed, invest our money with strangers, and pay taxes—all because we trust that nobody will mug us, take the cash to Cancún, or use government revenue to enrich a family company.... Today, when your credit-card number makes regular trips to Bangalore and Ghana, start-ups get their money from millions of pensioners and private investors, and you put your life in the hands of several federal bureaucracies whenever you fly or take a train, trust is holding up the world. We had all better hope this Atlas does not shrug.But, he reports, studies show that we trust our government (and each other) less and less all the time.
each new morn,An article about evil and human nature in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
New widows howl, new
orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven in the face.
Ms. Crow showed up at the latest public relations exercise for the music industry, the American Music Awards, dressed in a sequined t-shirt with the message "War Is Not The Answer" blazoned across it. One word: Sequins? Here is a fabulously wealthy, famously cute singer, telling the impoverished men, women and children tortured, gassed and abused by one of the most disgusting dictators of all time that any attempt to rescue or liberate them is "not the answer." And she expresses this message in sequins. She couldn't afford diamonds?I'm off to take a walk while the weather is merely brisk and not positively arctic. I'll try to post more later today.
Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians—vastly greater than any dislike of Jews of Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," they write, "when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."Fascinating stuff, with implications that might well make both parties squirm. The original article is here — well worth a look (scroll down to "Fall 2002").
As for why the Democrats' secularist support goes unreported, Bolce and De Maio articulate well the obvious explanation. Mostly secularists and Democratic voters themselves, elite journalists tend to see the influence of conservative Christians as a danger and therefore a story. At the same time, they are all too aware that Americans at large remain a predominantly religious people; thus, journalists "implicitly understand the political ramifications of characterizing the Democrats" as the party of unbelievers—a group even more disliked than Conservative Christians.
It is often said, and rightly, that the West is the cradle of political freedom. When asked what we are fighting for in the war against terrorism, we say we are fighting to preserve freedom. This is true, but it is not wholly true, for, as Scruton points out, freedom unchecked is ultimately a self-consuming passion. Freedom animates civilization. But understood as the emancipation from restraint, freedom can also appear as the enemy of civilization, for civilization requires restraints. Hence the familiar paradox that freedom, if it is to flourish, requires definition, which means limitation and direction—unfreedom, if you will. This is not to deny the great, the inestimable value of freedom. It is simply to say that freedom cannot be rightly pursued in isolation from the ends that ennoble it.And Salon reviews a new book on globalization by Yale Law professor Amy Chua. Her title certainly isn't one of those annoyingly vague ones. The book is called World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.
Young said the auction winner would receive a lifetime of platonic companionship, including invitations to family outings and holiday gatherings as well as tips on writing, gardening and cooking. The minimum bid was $5 million.More holiday gatherings with family? As if people don't already have enough of those without buying themselves more.
The family was willing to relocate anywhere, and the elder Youngs would change their surname.
"You have patrons of the arts, museums and charities. I wanted a patron for my family," he said.
You can't go for the presidency unless you have a solid, steely ego, but you wonder if President Lieberman's ego would spill over and create a private pool in which he swims laps in his own private world. Would the historical meaning of a Lieberman presidency be: Am I fabulous or what?Lieberman just announced his candidacy this morning.
Rumsfeld noted the stark contrast between North and South Korea on that map. The North, he noted, is almost completely indistinguishable, while the South is almost completely illuminated. A stark example of the wonders of free markets.A bigger version of the picture is here.
It really is a wonder to look over. Find Japan first (note how illuminated it is, too), then find the brightly-lit nub just to the west of Japan's southern tip. That's South Korea. The barren darkness just above it is North Korea. Note the similar contrast between Cuba and Florida. Between China and Japan.
On Friday night we saw The Two Towers, and when Legolas swung himself backwards onto that moving horse, I think I got pregnant.(Via InstaPundit.)
Bowing to criticism that too many students were receiving A's, the Harvard University faculty voted yesterday to overturn at least a generation of tradition by adopting a marking system more like that of most American colleges.Make a B "more palatable"? Guaranteed honors just for undertaking and finishing a senior thesis? For crying out loud, what are they doing up there? Does the Harvard faculty rock and burp their students before they put the students to sleep every night?
...
At a closed meeting, the faculty voted in favor of two sweeping changes. First, Harvard will switch from an idiosyncratic 15-point grading scale to the more conventional scale in which a 4.0 is an A and a zero is an F. The change will narrow the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus, which the faculty hopes will make a B more palatable. Second, Harvard will limit the number of students allowed to graduate with honors to 60 percent of a class. Nearly 90 percent of the students in Harvard's class of 2001 graduated with some form of honors.
...
But in a 10-page report recommending the changes, Ms. Pedersen and two other deans openly agonized that the changes could backfire. In putting a cap on the number of students permitted to earn honors, they fretted, they might discourage students from taking intellectual risks like writing a senior thesis or taking a challenging course.
For at least a generation, the report said, students who decided to write a senior thesis entered into an implied contract with the faculty in their department that they would receive at least a cum laude degree.
Under the new system, writing a thesis will no longer hold out the promise of honors, and students may decide not to try an experience that has enriched senior year: staying up late researching and writing; developing an argument to defend in an oral examination by a faculty committee; and developing a deep relationship with a professor who has agreed to serve as a thesis adviser.
To my right, drivers waited patiently on the side of the road, some appearing eager and happy. When I reached the crest of a small hill, I expected to see something that would make sense of such thick weekend traffic. What I saw was a doughnut.I had a very similar experience.
Behind a high metal fence lies a workplace that is part Dickens and part Darwin, a dim, dirty, hellishly hot place where men are regularly disfigured by amputations and burns, where turnover is so high that convicts are recruited from local prisons, where some workers urinate in their pants because their bosses refuse to let them step away from the manufacturing line for even a few moments.The article is long, but worth a read.
To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor.
[S]ubject to exceptions for the most extreme cases, it's not at all clear that being overweight is an independent health risk of any kind, let alone something that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.That puts this into perspective. The article also criticizes those "body mass index" tables:
The arbitrariness of these charts becomes clear as soon as one starts applying them to actual human beings. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out last July, taking the BMI charts seriously requires concluding that Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan are all "overweight," and that Sylvester Stallone and baseball star Sammy Sosa are "obese."The article concludes:
A rational public health policy would emphasize that the keys to good health (at least those that anyone can do anything about--genetic factors remain far more important than anything else) are, in roughly descending order of importance: not to smoke, not to be an alcoholic or drug addict, not to be sedentary, and not to eat a diet packed with junk food.In other words, exercise and nutrition are key, and a thin couch potato is still a couch potato.
She found that many people cannot bear to hear about trauma. It is too painful in itself or it reminds them what life can become at any moment.Perhaps the reviewer hasn't done a good job of presenting Brison's experience, but this leaves me confused. Her mother failing to mention the attack was hurtful, but her aunt acknowledging it as a "horrible experience" is just as bad? Was it not a horrible experience? Is it intrinsically offensive to wish to remind a suffering person that there is good in the world? What is the appropriate thing to say?The first card I received from my mother, while I was still in the hospital, made no mention of the attack or of my pain and featured the "bluebird of happiness," sent to keep me ever cheerful.Her mother's second card bore these words: "Isn't the sun nice? Isn't the wind nice? Isn't everything nice?" Three months afterwards, an aunt with whom she had been close all her life, sent a birthday card, saying she was sorry about her niece's "horrible experience" but adding that the victim would now be "able to help so many people."
GANDALF: Hey, kids. Miss me?There's more where that came from. Thanks to Eve Tushnet for the link.
ARAGORN: Gandalf! You're alive!
LEGOLAS: I almost had a facial expression from the joy of it!
ARAGORN: Hmm. This must be a dream.
ARWEN: Why do you say that?
ARAGORN: Because you're not even supposed to be IN this book.
ROHIRRIM GUARD: Sire, there are some really femmy people at the gate. They have bows.
ARAGORN: Those are Elves. Let them in.
ROHIRRIM GUARD: Oh! Elves! Wow, I didn't expect that.
PEOPLE WHO READ THE BOOK: Neither did I...
GIMLI: Aragorn! Toss me!
ARAGORN: Um, is this really the time?
TOP TEN SIGNS YOUR NEIGHBOR IS MAKING CLONESEugene Volokh has a good post on religious arguments against cloning.
10. You admire his dog. Offers to make you one.
9. Toll collector spotted four of him in the carpool lane.
8. Always at Kinko's studying the equipment.
7. He's an unmarried scientist with 53 sons.
6. You're pretty sure you saw Einstein, Lincoln and Heidi Klum lounging around his pool.
5. The clumsy attempts to make his kids look different using hats.
4. When your wife has twins, he howls, "Amateur."
3. On hot summer days, neighbor kid sets up a Clonaid stand.
2. His son's birthday cake reads, "Happy Somatic Cell Genetic Mutation Day Darren!"
1. You look out your window and you see you washing his car.
THERE IS NO SCORE -- "There IS a score. It is 0-0."And while we're at it, can we get cable news reporters to start using verbs again?
____ IN COLOR -- "As opposed to green in size."
HAVING SAID THAT and THAT SAID -- "Annoying useless filler."
MUST-SEE TV -- "Must find remote. Must change channel."
'[U]niforms, so vigorously despised in much current rhetoric about clothes, are really what most people prefer to wear.' ... Dressing approximately like others is to don armor against contempt. Better to be not noticed at all than noticed and targeted as odd.It mentions Richard Nixon's failed attempt to make the White House police look like Swiss Guards: "Nixon, of course, had attempted to replace a uniform with a costume."
Just before World War I the Kimberly-Clark Company developed a highly absorbent form of cellulose that they called Cellucotton. It was 5 times as absorbent as cotton and more resistant to infection at half the price.... They discovered that nurses had been using the pads as what we now call 'sanitary napkins' and thought they could commercialize it. But how? — the management didn't want the company name associated with the product, and even ladies' magazines wouldn't take ads for it.... The association problem was solved by setting up a whole new subsidiary. The ad agency addressed their issues by renaming the product Kotex, as in 'cotton textile', and simply noted that it was highly absorbent without further hints. And even this was too much for Ladies' Home Journal back in 1921.But women had trouble figuring out what they were supposed to use this stuff for, and sales were slow until Kotex finally began marketing the product as "A Safe Solution to Women's Greatest Hygiene Problem."
Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale, constructed of hammered concrete in the early '60s, when avant-garde architects were experimenting in a style called "brutalism," is absolutely dismal in parts of its interior. The stairwells feel like a movie set for Escape from New York. Utility conduits snake crudely over surfaces. The most basic function of a building—keeping foul weather out—is only half-performed. I've visited the building often since 1982, and for as long as I can remember cold air has rushed in every winter through a two-inch gap beneath one of the stairwell doors. Millions of BTUs have been wasted. Rudolph's is a truly anti-social building, and its users simply will not be bothered to maintain it. The problem isn't money, it is the building's arrogance, which registers in people's psyches and weakens their commitment to keeping the structure in good order.The article quotes MIT professor Bill Hubbard, who thinks architecture should be more like the law, "upholding forms that have gained acceptance over time, and expanding or diverging from those forms cautiously as new conditions warrant.... Such guidelines do not rule out innovation. They only require that the innovation have sufficient justification—that it not be a whim."
We all know what happened next. The planners took neighborhoods that worked, called them slums, and had them torn down to replace them with projects that quickly became violent, drug-infested hellholes.New Haven built some of those high-rise public housing projects, and they proved just as disastrous as the ones in other cities. A "progressive" acquaintance of mine once tried to justify New Haven's miserable experience by explaining that 60s-era planners mistakenly thought that New Haven was going to become a huge city. So they weren't just meddling utopians — they were incompetent meddling utopians!
[R]eally interesting world, but truly annoying characters. Imagine if all of the Lord of the Rings protagonists were replaced by teens out of Beverly Hills 90210, as conceived by a middle-aged Vietnam vet, and Tolkien had spent three times as many pages describing the boring wandering around bits.Yikes. That's more than enough to turn me off.
The editorial board of the New York Times declares:And it's even more bizarre that the Times insists food stamps are "not even charity." Can't something be "a nutrition program" and charity/welfare? Or are soup kitchens just "nutrition programs?" Is something not charity if the government does it? Baffling.In fact, food stamps are not welfare, not even charity, but a nutrition program that helps the poor buy food.I love the bogus, whistling-past-the-graveyard authority of "In fact." ... Of course food stamps are welfare, under virtually all definitions of the term. The most common definition -- and my definition -- would define "welfare" as assistance that a) helps people get what they need to live and b) that's available to poor recipients even if they don't work. Despite some spotty "work requirements" decreed over the years, food stamps remain largely available to poor workers and shirkers alike.
It doesn't matter, then, that food stamps aren't cash -- they readily substitute for cash and can be traded for cash. It doesn't matter that, as the Times notes, many food stamp recipients actualy do some work -- many recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (the successor program to the hated Aid to Families with Dependent Children) work also. Indeed, the Times could just as easily have claimed that TANF itself is "not welfare, not even charity, but a financial assistance program that helps the poor buy food and housing." (Isn't housing and clothing as important as food?) But if TANF isn't welfare, what is? Like TANF and AFDC, the food stamp program is stigmatized, and rightly so, not because nobody on food stamps works, but because you don't have to work to get the aid ...
It's a measure of the Times' distance from the citizenry that they would think the average American might conceivably be bullied into agreeing that "food stamps are not welfare." ... (If you adopt a broader definition of "welfare" occassionally used by both liberals and conservatives -- in which any means-tested program qualifies -- food stamps are still welfare.)
When the Soviet Union was still there, apologetics for Moscow's politics were not uncommon among foreign experts -- but the Soviets never got such an easy ride as the Chinese are getting now. Dissidents from the Soviet empire were always taken seriously; some became famous. Human rights abuses weren't routinely explained away with appeals to "different cultural traditions.'' Enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, though by no means unknown, was still a bit eccentric -- but praising the People's Republic of China is entirely respectable.Indeed.
"This is an addictive thing that hurts the students themselves," said Ian Ayres, a professor at the Yale Law School who opposes much of the Internet's entry into the classroom, saying that computer use is rude and that other students are "demoralized" by seeing their peers' attention wander.I think "ballistic" is a bit of an overstatement.
"When you see 25 percent of the screens playing solitaire, besides its being distracting, you feel like a sucker for paying attention," Professor Ayres said.
Unless law students are fully engaged in the class, he said, they miss out on the give and take of ideas in class discussion and do not develop the critical thinking skills that emerge from "deeply tearing apart a case."
Professor Ayres tried to prohibit all Internet use in his classroom. The students "went ballistic," he said, and insisted that their multitasking ways made them more productive and even more alert in class.
Lately, he said, he has loosened the restrictions, telling students they could surf from the back rows, so others would not be distracted.
Any teacher worth his or her shiny apple knows that a student can get all A's, go to the highest ranked schools and still fail life. Every child knows that it never mattered where his mother went to college. Why do parents, who were once children and always teachers, forget this wisdom when they need it most?I suppose it is because they are also parents.
Editors and other list-makers hardly bother anymore to so much as round off the number of list items to, say, a cool 10, 15 or 100. Nor does each entry necessarily have to fit the stated purpose of the list. Time magazine includes in its list of 14 "People Who Mattered" in 2002 Joe Pantoliano, the actor who got his head chopped off in an episode of "The Sopranos." Huh?I actually find the lists quite amusing--probably a result of my Gen Y upbringing that demands sound bites and instant gratification.
How about Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. United States, in which the Supreme Court upheld the institutional anhilation of the Mormon church, ending a four decade long legal struggle over polygamy.A good guess, but not what I had in mind.
I always thought that the name of "Brown v. Board" was sort of approrpriate in a decidedly non-PC way.Excellent, but not quite. Eric's answer, however, is the closest guess, yet. He's thinking along the right lines.
The major television news networks and the Associated Press are seriously considering dissolving their decadelong partnership in the Voter News Service, the Election Day polling organization that was at the heart of the problems they had in reporting the results of the last two national elections.The article says a decision could come as soon as next Monday.
"Some say, `Who cares if a flower is blooming earlier or the range is shifting north?'" said biologist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas at Austin, who co-authored one of the Nature articles. "The idea that everything can shift around the globe [in response] is fine if everything is a wilderness area. The problem is, a lot of the world is a cornfield or urban area like Chicago."Indeed.
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"We've boxed all these species into these habitats that we thought we could maintain with some mild management and a little bit of restoration," she said, "And boom!--climate change comes along and suddenly the very placement of these will be wrong."
Many students relish having easy access to grading histories, but college instructors here and across the country are complaining that Pick-A-Prof is the worst blow to the integrity of higher education since Cliffs Notes.I couldn't agree more. And the response students give to these arguments are not compelling.
"There is no relation between an easy A and the quality of learning," UW sociology professor Carrie Yang Costello said.
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Professors warned that Pick-A-Prof will result in grade inflation.
"There will be an influence on professors to bring students into their classes by not grading too hard," said Jennifer Maher, an associate professor of women's studies.
Professors who criticize the service underestimate their students, Chilek said.Come on. If these are really the arguments, then why do you need to know what the grade distribution is?
"The students know that if they go for the easy A, then they won't have the background they will need to succeed in a higher-level course," he said.
Some college students defend the site as a valuable tool for increasing accountability among professors and giving students more information as they choose expensive courses.
"You pay for a class and you want to get something out of it," said Kory Kozloski, the UW student association president.
