Efforts to restructure Detroit, specifically GM and Chrysler, are not too different from our efforts to reform the public schools. Both processes seem to go on forever, never coming to an end, never changing things for the better. (See today’s op ed piece by David Brooks in the NYTimes.) At what do we most often [...]
Archive for March 2009
Restructuring the automobile industry, reforming the schools
March 31, 2009This is surreal.
March 26, 2009This is a picture of our president seated courtside at a Washington Wizards Chicago Bulls basketball game. Joe Clark, a corporate lawyer who sat near the president…, described the experience as “surreal.” “I couldn’t believe that he was so accessible that I could literally shake his hand and heckle him about needing to suit up [...]
“Al Gore’s just an opportunist.” Freeman Dyson
March 25, 2009Although I don’t know enough to say that he is right I’d like to agree with Freeman Dyson when he says, as he does in this week’s NYTimes Magazine, that “… it all boils down to ‘a deeper disagreement about values’ between those who think ‘nature knows best’ and that ‘any gross human disruption of [...]
The Educational Experiment We Really Need?
March 22, 2009Two recent op ed pieces, the one by Sara Mosle in Slate Magazine, The Educational Experiment We Really Need, and the other by Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times, Education’s Ground Zero might profitably have been placed side-by-side in the same publication. Why? Well Mosle makes this judgment of KIPP or the Knowledge Is Power [...]
David Brooks, Rx for the Republicans
March 10, 2009Today in an op-ed piece in the Times David Brooks’ prescribes a course of action for the Republicans. The good news is that David’s prescription offers the no longer grand old party a life preserver. The bad news is that, in David’s view, the Republicans probably won’t take it. What David says is sensible, reasonable, [...]
сто делатъ
March 8, 2009In some ways nothing has changed. The overriding political issue of our time, as it was in the times of the French and Russian revolutions, is that the few have a lot, and the many a little. (And it’s probably even more true in Russia today.) We know that only when these two camps seem [...]
Thornton Wilder’s “New Hampshire Boys”
March 8, 2009Today in the New York times Frank Rich tells us that it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery and says: “New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought [...]
Paris Walk
March 7, 2009It’s still cold in Paris, but bundled up we still do a lot of walking. Today it was lunch at home and then a walk across the Seine with Notre Dame on our left, stopping at a little café on l’île Saint-Louis before reaching the Saint Paul Metro station and from there taking la rue [...]
