Flickr User gavinandrewstewart
As a guest on an NPR talk show, discussing the election results in New York's 23d Congressional District, I was asked to offer my perspective on the likely impact of the challenge mounted by "tea party" conservatives against the woman selected by local party leaders to run as the official Republican nominee. A theme ran through the conversation and through the calls from listeners: the Republican nominee was "a moderate"; the Republicans who opposed her were part of a disturbingly right-wing fringe; and the challenge was an ominous portent of a looming intra-party civil war aimed at driving responsible Republicans...More
James Fallows has an insight on the Fort Hood shootings that I feel is wise: "The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy." I would add that the felt need to learn a lesson from individual madness often leads to institutionalized madness--as with the "zero tolerance" rules that sprouted up in schools after Columbine and result in suspensions of girls found with Midol, or a first grader with his Cub Scout...More
There's been a lot of discussion, this week, about whether President Obama has fulfilled enough promises or expectations of change since his election a year ago. "I voted for him, and I really thought everything would be different," one disappointed voter from Iowa said in a televised interview. It would be easy to dismiss the expectations of such voters as unrealistic or naive, but we often expect more from big watershed events, and in more sweeping, immediate fashion, than life dishes out. Consider, for example, another important anniversary coming up on Monday: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin...More
While that is not a knock (being a liberal is not a sin) it's not thoroughly inappropriate for a political party--if we must have them--to draw the line somewhere; otherwise party has no meaning at all. Those who believe parties serve a purpose (something I seriously doubt) are within their rights to believe that while one may differ on several issues, there is, at some point, such a thing as too much
On September 24, Recession Road Trip wrote about Charles Zimmerman, a 60-year-old former soldier who, together with his wife, was newly homeless in Sacramento. Zimmerman had been the subject of a post a week earlier that described his efforts to get the military to pay him his pension, which he said had been caught in red tape for years. Now, we reported, in the aftermath of our first post, Zimmerman said he had been approached by an Army official who promised him a check for $972,000, back pay for the 18 years since his retirement. Shortly after the September 24...More
Click here for all the installments of this account of the protests in Tehran last month. This is a small point. I have mentioned the funny hats, the parade of uniforms, the howling masses seeking to be heard and then entertained. What kept the event from being even more like a carnival or state fair (think Shriners, Boy Scouts, crowds at a sideshow) was the total absence of food, let alone Cokes and funnel cakes. Quds Day fell, as it does every year, on the last Friday in Ramadan. Pervading this fiesta of Palestinian solidarity and anti-Semitism was hunger and...More
Paul Kennedy famously argued that imperial overstretch -- that is, devoting too much money and resources to military uses -- plays a central role in the decline of great powers, including the United States. But it looks like America's growing obesity epidemic is reducing the pool of capable recruits, according to this story in The Washington Post (via Dana Goldstein). About 75 percent of the country's 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces, according to a report to be issued...More
(This is an account of the Quds Day rally in Tehran. Click here for all parts of the series.) At a stand just off Enqelab, near the center of the Quds Day rally, a very active desk gave away and sold postcards and memorabilia about the Palestinian cause, and about the perfidy of the Israelis. For about $1.50 I bought Holocaust, a book of illustrations by the Iranian political cartoonist Maziar Bijani, whose work the organizers sold proudly. I reproduce a few key images below. Think of it as an anti-Maus....More
When I put my son to bed at around 8:45 Wednesday night, after watching a few innings of the World Series, I read him a story and unavoidably looked at two items I've placed in his room: a 1956 Sports Illustrated cover illustration of a young superstar, Mickey Mantle; and a dinky plastic Yankees helmet autographed by a now-81-year-old man in New Jersey named Gil McDougald. The framed cover is on a wall and the helmet is atop a bookcase. Baseball was a potent vehicle for the assimilation of my German immigrant father into American culture. He arrived in New...More
Author, lawyer, civil libertarian
11/04/09 5:48 PM
Equality, Marriage, and the Right to Discriminate
Hannah Arendt characterized the "right to marry whoever one wishes" as elementary, locating it among the "inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.'" She was concerned with miscegenation laws, which in her view "constitut(ed) a much more flagrant breach of the letter and spirit of the Constitution than segregation of schools." She even considered political rights, including the right to vote, "secondary" to "the right to home and marriage."This defense of marriage rights appears in "Reflections on Little Rock," Arendt's controversial critique of federal efforts to desegregate public schools, written over...More
Contrary to what we're so often told, American students are not bad at math and science.The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development published a study not long ago that concluded that, contrary to fears expressed by educators and potential employers, American students have not wavered in their interest in science and math over the past 30 years. But, the study also found that many of the highest performing students were choosing non-science and math careers, the reason being, of course, a lack of opportunity and growth in those fields. Basic economics tells us that human beings tend to follow the money. In the late 1990s, the dot...More
Can someone explain to me why it is a criminal offense to have sex with animals but entirely legal to kill and eat them? Surely laws against bestiality don't reflect concern about the rights of animals, (who would probably opt for sex over death.) I don't mean to denigrate meat eating (I'm a carnivore;) I do mean to point out the absurdities of imprisoning people for "buggery."...More
Traffic diminishes on Ferdowsi Street every Friday morning, and especially during Ramadan. But only on a strange and special Friday does it decline to almost nothing, as it did today. Normally it is one of those traffic-menaced central Tehran boulevards where drivers cut each other off for sport, and where pedestrians who missed the Iran-Iraq War can satisfy their urges for martyrdom. Today its car traffic was mostly blocked off, and all the pedestrians had already gone up to Enqelab Street, the main drag of the Quds Day parade....More
What began as limited exploration into a small example of possible mortgage fraud in Chicagoland has spiralled out formidable leviathanic tentacles now taking residence across two walls of my hotel room. I've looked progressively more pale and bewildered every time I venture out for sustenance, always stopping by the front desk to re-confirm that housekeeping will not touch my room. I ran out of clean towels yesterday. They probably think I'm cooking meth....More
New research by the Gallup Organization finds that 700 million people - 16 percent of the world's total population - would like to move to a different country than the one they currently call home.The first map below shows the percentages of people in various regions of the world that desire to permanently move to another country.The second map shows the places these movers would most like to relocate to.Gallup also compiled a very interesting index of potential net migration which compares "the estimated number of adults who would like to move out of a country permanently subtracted from the...More
TEHRAN -- Slightly over a month ago, anti-government protesters (the ones not yet in prison, or murdered) went back to the streets of Tehran, in a counter-protest against a government-orchestrated parade. The protesters wore easily identifiable green, so they knew that if Basij militiamen wanted to bust their heads, their colors would mark clearly which heads to bust. And bust they did. Media and cell-phone cameras captured images of young revolutionaries thwacked in the street and bleeding, and stories of the violence ran all over the Web and in print. My colleagues Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan were especially...More
Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform principles, with a cult following in academic economics) in the 1920s, and its ultimate pro-capitalist version, authorized for a pittance by the unworldly original patent holder, in the 1930s. (The developer of that...More
For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81, Evans has written his memoir, covering the full arc of his very full life. His youth and early career take nearly half...More
In the extensive coverage surrounding the 40th running of the New York City marathon this past weekend, more than one piece questioned whether marathon races had lost their elite edge. An op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday bemoaned the change in coverage from the pure, rarefied competition between the elite runners to human-interest stories about less professional athletes who competed. Cameron Stracher, who wrote the piece, argued that the long lag in U.S. marathon champions was due, at least in significant part, to this shift in coverage and "narrative," which lessened the public's excitement and inspiration to...More
This interesting movie could have been much better; nevertheless, it is worth seeing. Its plot centers on the war crime trial of a Bosnian Serb general who allegedly committed acts of ethnic cleansing against the Bosnian Muslims during the civil war in Bosnia (part of the old Yugoslav Tito-run Balkan state which was settled during the Clinton presidency). General Goran Duric (Drazen Kuhn) appears at the outset of the film, three years before the trial that the film focuses on, in hiding in Spain with his wife and children. He is soon captured and sent to the Hague for trial...More
Former NYC mayor (1978-89), film buff
11/02/09 2:34 PM
"The Maid" Could Easily Be Swept Under the Bed
I wanted to see a movie that had been around for a while, since the week's new openings did not read very well in the reviews. The New York Daily News gave this film four stars so I thought to myself that it would be a safe bet, after all, what have I got to lose? Regrettably, plenty in terms of time. And at the age of 85, time is very precious. While I stood in line at the Angelika Film Center waiting for the earlier performance to end, I decided to ask people exiting what they had thought...More
Today, we take it for granted the streets are there to move cars, and also to carry buses as well as cyclists, pedestrians, and the occasional skater, scooter-rider, and Segway user. The typical solution is to keep pedestrians on the sidewalk and paint lanes on the street to separate cars from cyclists or create express lanes for buses.But maybe there's another approach: Why not consider devoting different streets to different kinds of transportation? And surely cities need more green space and some are actually getting it. Inspired by the High-Line Park, by DC's Rock Creek Park, and Toronto's extensive ravine...More
To some, the election contest in New York's 23rd Congressional District is a thing of high drama, with the advocates of competing political perspectives engaged in a mighty struggle to shape the outlines of a resurgent Republican Party. It is a battle, we are told, for the very soul of the GOP. The truth is, it's more like a battle for the party's sole, a low-minded race to the political bottom. The part of that race that has captured the greatest attention is the Republican "primary." One of the candidates in this sad story is running on the Republican Party...More
I've blogged in this space before about the many ways in which modern life promotes bigness--in business, government, finance, health care and so forth. Here's another: the New York Times is reporting that a new federal law requiring safety testing of toys, adopted in response to an influx of unsafe toys from overseas, may be a threat to artisanal toy-makers who use maple, beeswax and other wholesome stuff. It seems they can't afford the testing. We've seen situations like this many times before. People are horrified to discover the dangers of some sensitive product--say, milk--and government reacts with legislation. But that...More
It was pure absurdist surrealism in the guise of a kids' show.I was 12 when I first saw Soupy Sales. His show was on a local LA station; this was several years before he moved his operation to New York and achieved a certain national notoriety. Twelve was the perfect age for such an encounter, really: too mature for the simple kids' entertainment that the show purported to be, but just about old enough to begin to grasp, with delighted amazement, what it was actually aiming for. There was Soupy, with his wonderful rubbery face, full of warmth and manic...More
In nearly five months of driving highways and byways across the country, "Going Out of Business" signs have seemed a standard element of the modern American landscape. I barely notice them anymore, even those hued in sense-shocking shades of florescent with four-foot letters screaming "EVERYTHING MUST GO!". At the 243 T-junction entering Osceola, Wisconsin, I make an uncharacteristically complete stop as my mind demands processing time for the unusual sight of a "Grand Opening" banner....More
