PICTURE THIS: gay student organizations forced to accept those who believe that homosexuality is an abomination. Student political groups, such as Young Republicans or Young Democrats, compelled to allow members of the other party to vote on policy platforms. A law association for African American students being told that it must let white supremacists run [...]
Archive for April, 2010
Politically correct, legally wrong
Posted in Law on April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
Wellness
Posted in On Language, tagged April 18 2010 on April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
“Wellness,” intoned Dan Rather in November 1979, introducing a “60 Minutes” segment on a new health movement known by that name. “There’s a word you don’t hear every day.” More than three decades later, wellness is, in fact, a word that Americans might hear every day, or close to it. You can sign up for [...]
Is Marriage Good for Your Health?
Posted in Living on April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” [...]
Weighing the Evidence on Exercise
Posted in Living on April 19, 2010 | Comments Off
How exercise affects body weight is one of the more intriguing and vexing issues in physiology. Exercise burns calories, no one doubts that, and so it should, in theory, produce weight loss, a fact that has prompted countless people to undertake exercise programs to shed pounds. Without significantly changing their diets, few succeed. “Anecdotally, all [...]
Laboratory Life
Posted in Natural sciences on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Here’s a problem: evolution never stops. Imagine you’re a wild fruit fly, of the species Drosophila melanogaster. You’re happily feasting on some yeast that’s growing on rotting fruit when, whoomf, you get sucked into a bottle and taken to a laboratory. From now on, this is your home. Life in a bottle — or cage [...]
Why Republicans Are Winning on the Tax Issue
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Americans understand what Obama spending means for their pocketbooks. Today’s last-minute trip to the post office to mail in your return is a reminder of one of life’s unpleasant realities: paying taxes. Always important in politics, the tax issue is likely to play a larger role this year than in any midterm election since 1994. [...]
Iran, Israel and the Bomb
Posted in Conflicts and wars on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Sorting the real, from the phony, nuclear proliferation threats. As far as grand summitry goes, an American President hasn’t hosted something like the current two-day talk-in on nuclear security in Washington since—well, as the Obama Administration described it, not since the San Francisco Conference of 1945. That meeting created the United Nations and helped establish [...]
Putin Gesture Heralds New Era in Russian-Polish Relations
Posted in History on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Remembering the Katyn Massacre At a ceremony Wednesday to mark the 1940 Katyn massacre, Vladimir Putin became the first Russian prime minister to pay tribute to the Polish dead. The gesture could mark a thaw in Russian-Polish relations, which have been tense in recent years. The snow had not thawed completely under the pine trees [...]
The Lesson of the Joking ‘Shoe-Bomber’
Posted in Law on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Profiling’ turns out to have widespread public support. Since 9/11, one of the big open questions has been how willing Americans are for all forms of intelligence to be used to stop potential terrorists. In particular, profiling by suspicious behavior has been largely off-limits as overly subjective, giving authorities too much discretion to target people. [...]
From a Songbird, New Insights Into the Brain
Posted in Natural sciences on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Researchers have gained new insights into the brain by decoding the genome of the zebra finch, a songbird whose males learn a single love song from their fathers that they repeat through life. A team led by Wesley C. Warren and Richard K. Wilson at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis decoded [...]
What’s Not Happening to American Muslims
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
To hear Hollywood and the media tell it, American Muslims were the ultimate victims of 9/11. What nonsense. It can’t have come as a surprise that one of the now entrenched myths about America—namely, its ongoing victimization of Muslims—should have been voiced again by a leading citizen of our myth-producing capital, Hollywood. The citizen was [...]
Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?
Posted in Living on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them, often not stopping [...]
He’s a Dreamer, He’s a Realist
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
In matters of national security, confusion is always dangerous. This week 36 heads of state gathered in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit. On Tuesday the Washington Post printed on its front page individual photos of 11 of them with Mr. Obama. It looked like the Christmas line at Macy’s for Santa Claus photos. [...]
A place in the sun
Posted in Energy and Environment on April 18, 2010 | Comments Off
Climate science and its discontents RON OXBURGH, breezily pushing his bicycle through a clot of journalists outside the press briefing he had just given, is a busy man happy to hurry. Critics of his investigation into the scientific probity of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia will hold that haste [...]
Change We Can Believe In
Posted in Mathematics on April 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Long before I knew what calculus was, I sensed there was something special about it. My dad had spoken about it in reverential tones. He hadn’t been able to go to college, being a child of the Depression, but somewhere along the line, maybe during his time in the South Pacific repairing B-24 bomber engines, [...]
The Fog Over Katyn Forest
Posted in History on April 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Poland’s struggle of memory against forgetting. ‘The struggle of people against power,” Milan Kundera famously observed, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Is there any place that better captures that truth than the Katyn Forest, or any metaphor more apt for Katyn’s place in our historical memory than fog? It was, of course, a [...]
Remorse As a Way of Life
Posted in History on April 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Dwelling on the West’s past sins is strangely narcissistic—debilitating, too. Over the years, historians and political scientists, studying the ways in which societies organize themselves, have come up with a range of categories to describe the state itself: the “feudal state,” for instance, or the “garrison state,” or, more recently, the “knowledge state.” Properly applied, [...]
Why It’s So Hard To Get Real
Posted in Living on April 17, 2010 | Comments Off
The dangers of ‘a dopey nostalgia for a nonexistent past.’ Remember when eating organic food made you unusual? That was barely a decade ago, when people in the vanguard celebrated the superior taste of organic food, not mention its health benefits and environmental friendliness. But no sooner had the rest of us caught up than [...]
A Tax Form for the Marginally Employed
Posted in Living on April 17, 2010 | Comments Off
Sam Potts, New York Times __________ Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/13/opinion/20100413_opart.html
The Right Ramps Up
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on April 13, 2010 | Comments Off
A vast conservative conspiracy? We’ll see in November. A dozen years after Hillary Clinton complained about a vast, right-wing conspiracy, some Republicans are beginning to wonder if she didn’t have some good ideas after all. Meet American Crossroads, a new 527 political organization promising to spend $50 million this year electing Republicans. The press immediately [...]
Iran, Israel and the Bomb
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on April 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Sorting the real, from the phony, nuclear proliferation threats. As far as grand summitry goes, an American President hasn’t hosted something like the current two-day talk-in on nuclear security in Washington since—well, as the Obama Administration described it, not since the San Francisco Conference of 1945. That meeting created the United Nations and helped establish [...]
The Better Pope
Posted in Religion on April 13, 2010 | Comments Off
The world didn’t always agree with Pope John Paul II, but it always seemed to love him. Handsome and charismatic, with an actor’s flair and a statesman’s confidence, he transformed the papacy from an Italian anachronism into a globe-trotting phenomenon. His authority stabilized a reeling church; his personal holiness inspired a generation of young Catholics. [...]
A Monkey Born of Trials and Tribulations
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
The husband-and-wife team of Margret and H.A. Rey may have imagined a different sort of immortality for themselves. But as far as their countless young readers were concerned, “we were best known as the parents of Curious George, the little monkey hero of our most famous books,” Margret once said, referring to those sacred texts [...]
The Pain of Losing a Spouse Is Singular
Posted in Living on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
As my husband of 43 years approached the end of his life and the anguish within me welled like a dam ready to burst, I realized something both simplistic and profound — losing a spouse is nothing like losing a parent. I lived with my parental family for 17 years before I moved out to [...]
A Talent for the Game
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
On one day in April 1986, nine baseball players from the Dominican Republic started at shortstop in the major leagues. Seven of them, including Tony Fernandez, Julio Franco and Alfredo Griffin, came from a small Dominican town called San Pedro de Macorís. Sports Illustrated writer Steve Wulf noted this remarkable display of Dominican athleticism and [...]
When Criminals Clam Up
Posted in Law on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Black marketeers invade the shellfish racket, and officials try to stop them. It would seem to be a familiar tale of tough-guy law enforcement, with a plotline somewhere between “Kojak” and “CSI.” Lawmen track down leads, sift through evidence, set up stakeouts, work informers, cut deals with low-lifes and work their way up the food [...]
About an Author, Much Ado
Posted in Literature on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
A close look at the skeptics who argue that Shakespeare did not write his plays. Certain skeptical readers have maintained for more than 150 years that William Shakespeare, the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616 after years of literary success in London, did not write the plays we [...]
Even Among Animals: Leaders, Followers and Schmoozers
Posted in Other on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
I recently tried taking a couple of online personality tests, and I must say I was disappointed by the exercise. I was asked bland amorphisms like whether I was “someone who tends to find fault” with people (duh), is generally “friendly and agreeable” (see previous response), and always “does a thorough job” (can I just [...]
In Syria, a Prologue for Cities
Posted in History on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
RICH DISCOVERIES American and Syrian investigators at the site known as Tell Zeidan have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of Ubaid artifacts, including painted pot fragments. The site could yield discoveries for decades Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set [...]
So Happy Together
Posted in Politics on April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Multiculturalism can not replace democratic rights. When Portugal handed Macau over to China in 1999, it was a city of complex contradictions: a place where organized crime thrived alongside conservative Chinese values that had been all but extinguished under mainland communism; where casinos and brothels rested near ancient Jesuit churches; a city whose culture was [...]
