Many talk about the demise of the newspaper (and perhaps also the book) as digital media become more widespread and people get “The News” from the Internet. We need to look closely at what’s happening, especially now with the advent of the iPad, at what we may be losing, but also and probably more important, [...]
Archive for January 2010
A Few First Thoughts on the End of the Printed Word
January 31, 2010The First Year of the Obama Presidency
January 26, 2010I find myself mostly agreeing with this commentary from Columbia University researcher, Alice Kessler-Harris, in the current edition of Dissent Magazine: “I count myself among those disappointed in Barack Obama’s presidency so far. I had not expected miracles, but I had hoped for a more dramatic turnaround in our politics: for an end to the [...]
More on the poverty in Haiti, this time with Nicholas Kristof and Mark Danner
January 21, 2010(If you haven’t already read Ben Macintyre’s piece, The Fault Line in Haiti Runs Straight to France, in today’s London TimesOnLine go HERE, read it and then come back, although what Ben tells us about Haiti’s appalling French connection during the past several hundred years may make all that I have to say below meager [...]
Idle Thoughts
January 17, 2010In letter exchanges with John Adams as well as in his own autobiographical writings Thomas Jefferson proposed that, “instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests [...]
I wonder if our President reads Thomas Friedman
January 17, 2010Thomas Friedman has no need of me to call attention to his op ed pieces. He has a readership. I have none. Nevertheless today he speaks exactly my mind (and I suppose that of many others). When he says this in today’s Times: “Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way [...]
More on Chester Finn and school reform
January 16, 2010Chester Finn, no less than Arne Duncan and his “Race to the Top,” labors under the (mis-)conception that student achievement levels depend primarily on what the educators, – the teachers, administrators, and politicians — do, and that downward or flat, as at the present time, achievement levels call for additional reforms. Maybe, but so far [...]
School Ramblings brought on by reading Chester Finn
January 14, 2010Chester E. Finn, Jr., in an article in the most recent issue of National Affairs, no less than the educational reformers of whom he speaks, has it all wrong. It’s not so much that the reforms have been misdirected, gone after the wrong targets, not been basic enough. It’s rather that the reforms and the [...]
The Jews
January 13, 2010David Brooks citing Steven L. Pease’s new book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” reminds us, or rather spells out for us, just how well the Jews have done throughout many of their adopted countries and most of all in the United States since the end of World War II. “Jews are a famously accomplished [...]
Aristotle and Wahid and the Voice of Moderate Islam
January 7, 2010Thomas Friedman has frequently written about the failure of moderate Muslim leaders to speak out against the Muslim extremists among them. In a recent Times op ed piece, for example, he writes: “What is really scary is that this violent, Jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most ‘legitimacy’ in the Muslim world today. Few political [...]
How do the terrorists see themselves?
January 6, 2010Probably not as terrorists. Certainly not as the embodiment of evil out to destroy the good. We actually know a lot about how they see themselves. They speak often of the validity, the rightness if not the goodness of their cause. Here are two examples. One from the Pakistani Five. Do you remember, those five [...]
