A couple of years ago the Atlantic Monthly asked a number of prominent writers and thinkers “who have had cause to consider the American idea to describe its future and the greatest challenges to it.” I thought I ought to give Tom Wolfe’s response as published in the Atlantic of November, 2007, special attention by [...]
Archive for September 2009
Pell-Mell
September 26, 2009Let a thousand flowers bloom
September 25, 2009In my lifetime, meaning the 77 years that I have lived, what has changed the most, and what the least? Clearly what has changed the most are the new skills that I have needed to acquire, from one year to the next, if not from one day to another, in order to fully benefit from [...]
Thomas Frank: The Left Should reclaim ‘Freedom’
September 16, 2009Now this from the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Frank. Another reasonable voice, this one on the Right. There are few things in politics more annoying than the right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word “freedom” that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital [...]
Didn’t she know that he had said this 50 years earlier? She should have.
September 12, 2009In a lead piece posted on her liberal outlet, the Huffington Post of September 3, Arianna Huffington had this to say about public education: Health care is rightly dominating the national debate, but with children all across the country heading back to school, education, currently seated in the back row of the national classroom, is [...]
Victor Hugo’s, “Elle avait pris ce pli…”
September 12, 2009Our third grandchild, and first granddaughter, Soleil Valdes, was born on September 3rd. I fully hope and expect that within a very few years she also will be stepping lightly into the large open office space that Josée and I call our grande salle, and where we both work, and that her arrival will infect [...]
Barack Obama’s Tanner lecture
September 12, 2009Over 31 years ago, on July 1, 1978, Obert Clark Tanner gave what was to be the very first Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Now listed on the Tanner web site there are nearly 200 lectures, nearly all of which are available for download in Adobe Reader format. These lectures [...]
Salman Rushdie’s words at the end of his 2002 Tanner Lecture
September 11, 2009We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the cold war, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the human genome project; [...]
