Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country. Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush’s integrity. “All the evidence points to the conclusion,” Kennedy said, that the Bush administration [...]
Archive for July, 2010
My Biggest Mistake in the White House
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 14, 2010 | Comments Off
FDR, Obama and ‘Confidence’
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Demonizing business deepened the Great Depression. The White House can learn from Roosevelt’s mistakes. What is confidence and why is it missing? The concept seems to be driving Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner crazy this summer. You can hear that when you listen to him talk about the poor quality of the current recovery. Last week, [...]
Obama’s Immigration Fakery
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 12, 2010 | Comments Off
In 2007, then-Sen. Obama helped derail an immigration bill he claimed to support. He’s no more serious about a bipartisan bill today. Many of us in the press have had a field day noting Sen. John McCain’s (R., Ariz.) transformation from immigration maverick to the Wyatt Earp of border control. Fair enough. Back when it [...]
Too Good To Check
Posted in Media on July 12, 2010 | Comments Off
How journalists create myths and legends, not least about themselves. Hello, city desk, get me rewrite. Here’s the lead: Many of the landmark moments in American journalism are carefully nurtured myths—or, worse, outright fabrications. William Randolph Hearst never said, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio [...]
Veiled Threats?
Posted in Other on July 12, 2010 | Comments Off
In Spain earlier this month, the Catalonian assembly narrowly rejected a proposed ban on the Muslim burqa in all public places — reversing a vote the week before in the country’s upper house of parliament supporting a ban. Similar proposals may soon become national law in France and Belgium. Even the headscarf often causes trouble. [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged July 11 2010 on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Protection from hurt feelings Everyone has experienced pain and sickness at some point in their lives. For such physical ailments, one of the first things we do–or are instructed to do by medical providers–is take a pain reliever, like acetaminophen (a.k.a., Tylenol). But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain. Our feelings can also [...]
Click here
Posted in The Word, tagged July 11 2010 on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
In those old dark days before the Internet (and before Twitter!), if you were stumped on a question of style, or puzzled as to how to use a word, you pretty much had a single option: Look it up in a book. Mostly that book was “the dictionary,” unless you were erudite enough to have [...]
Military Rule 2.0
Posted in Conflicts and wars on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Why bother with a coup when there are better ways to take control? Over the past two decades, Mexico has been touted as a democratic success story. After decades of single-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI, the country developed vibrant political contests, leading to the landmark election of several non-PRI presidents. [...]
How facts backfire
Posted in Other on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything [...]
Phys Ed: Your Brain on Exercise
Posted in Health on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
What goes on inside your brain when you exercise? That question has preoccupied a growing number of scientists in recent years, as well as many of us who exercise. In the late 1990s, Dr. Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in San Diego elegantly proved that human [...]
When Did We First ‘Rock the Mic’?
Posted in Language, tagged July 11 2010 on July 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Talk about a culture clash. Last month I found myself playing snippets of old-school hip-hop over tinny laptop speakers for a roomful of lexicographers at Oxford University. The occasion was the Fifth International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, an erudite gathering of scholars interested in exploring the work of dictionaries structured on historical principles. [...]
The LeBron Angle to Everything
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 10, 2010 | Comments Off
LeBron James is moving! Lindsay Lohan is crying! Paul the Octopus says Spain will win the World Cup! There are certain points in the year — like summer — when the country does not seem to be in the mood to think about politics or public policy. Nevertheless, we know where our duty lies, and [...]
The Medium Is the Medium
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living on July 9, 2010 | Comments Off
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years. Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found [...]
The selective modesty of Barack Obama
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama’s vision of NASA’s mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden: “One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; [...]
Obama and the Chicago Machine
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Testimony in the Blagojevich trial shows the White House in an unflattering light. Since that February 2007 day when a young U.S. senator announced an inspiring presidential run, Barack Obama has been on the lam. He’s been running from that Chicago machine that gave birth to his political career, but later became a liability to [...]
The Town Hall Revolt, One Year Later
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Democrats didn’t get the message. Will Republicans do better? Much has happened in the dense and shifting political landscape of the past 18 months—the quick breakdown along partisan lines in Congress; continuing arguments over spending, the economy and immigration,;the big Republican wins in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts; the Gulf oil spill; falling poll numbers [...]
Kicking the Hornet’s Nest
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Have you had your fill of glögg and Kaffebars, leather jackets with rivets and sausages with pickles? Do you want to hop off the tunnelbana, and move on from feminist-socialist-journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his pals, Eriksson, Svensson, Johansson, Jonasson, Nilsson, Martensson, Magnusson, Ekstrom, Edklinth and that suspected lesbian Satanist Lisbeth Salander, the most literally riveting [...]
Obama and the Spending Volcano
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 7, 2010 | Comments Off
An eruption of public spending from Mount Obama has caused deep anxieties among the voters in America’s villages. The Democrats in Washington are beginning to look like a tribe of volcano worshipers, living in the ever-present shadow of Mount Obama, which has been spewing federal spending into the American atmosphere nonstop for nearly two years. [...]
A Growth Agenda for the GOP
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on July 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Obama doubles down on ‘stimulus.’ Republicans can take advantage. During the last week, President Barack Obama doubled down on a losing political bet, further cementing the Democratic Party’s reputation as the champion of bigger deficits, higher spending and more government. He did so just as the public is crying out for lower deficits, less spending [...]
Friendship in an Age of Economics
Posted in Living on July 5, 2010 | Comments Off
When I was 17 years old, I had the honor of being the youngest person in the history of New York Hospital to undergo surgery for a herniated disc. This was at a time in which operations like this kept people in the hospital for over a week. The day after my surgery, I awoke [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged July 4 2010 on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Superstition works, kind of In our modern, enlightened society, most people claim not to be superstitious. Yet in high-stakes situations, many of those same people adopt superstitious beliefs such as lucky clothes, numbers, or places. Is this just a sign of emotional weakness? Is it metaphysical uncertainty? It turns out that such beliefs may help. [...]
Fine distinctions
Posted in The Word, tagged July 4 2010 on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Can we really tell ‘genuine’ from ‘authentic’? The quiz show host opened with a round of questions on word pairs, starting with the simplest: ”What is the difference between further and farther?” Aha, I thought, turning up the volume. Maybe I can’t spout 19th-century poetry like the educated Brits on the panel, but usage distinctions [...]
What happened to studying?
Posted in Living on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
You won’t hear this from the admissions office, but college students are cracking the books less and less They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one [...]
How America got its name
Posted in History on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer’s letter, and a pun Each July 4, as we celebrate the origins of America, we look back ritually at what happened in 1776: the war, the politics, the principles that defined our nation. But what about the other thing that defines America: the name itself? Its [...]
The other carbon-dioxide problem
Posted in Energy and Environment on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Acidification threatens the world’s oceans, but quantifying the risks is hard IN THE waters of Kongsfjord, an inlet on the coast of Spitsbergen, sit nine contraptions that bring nothing to mind as much as monster condoms. Each is a transparent sheath of plastic 17-metres long, mostly underwater, held in place by a floating collar. The [...]
The Origins of ‘One-Off’
Posted in On Language, tagged July 4 2010 on July 4, 2010 | Comments Off
Donn Barclay e-mails: “I have been hearing and reading the phrase ‘one-off’ more and more lately. It seems to me that it is a serious bastardization of ‘one-of,’ as in short for ‘one of a kind.’ Frankly, it makes absolutely no sense at all.” As William Safire observed in a 2007 On Language column, one-off [...]
Thoughts on a Declaration
Posted in Other on July 3, 2010 | Comments Off
In advance of the July 4 holiday, the editors asked contributors to The Stone, “What is the philosophical theme, or themes, in the Declaration of Independence that should be recalled in today’s America?”: Responses from Arthur C. Danto, Todd May and J.M. Bernstein are below.. The Pursuit of Happiness, Then and Now By Arthur C. [...]
Terror — and candor in describing the Islamist ideology behind it
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on July 2, 2010 | Comments Off
The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam? Attorney General Eric [...]
Authority and Arrogance: A Response
Posted in Living on July 1, 2010 | Comments Off
What subjects are fit to be addressed in public by a philosopher? Many of the responses to essays in The Stone raise this issue. Actually, commentators have been pressing at least two versions of the question. What sorts of things are worth looking at philosophically? And about what, if anything, do philosophers have any special [...]
