December 2005

Newton – “The greatest alchemist of them all”

by Gale E. Christianson In the weeks following Isaac Newton’s death, in March of 1727, Dr. Thomas Pellet, a member of the Royal Society, was contracted by Newton’s heirs to inventory the voluminous papers left behind by the great man. Nothwithstanding his respected credentials, the good doctor was in well over his head. Across sheaf […]

Inside Putin’s Russia by Andrew Jack

Now Moscow is debating another dangerous proposal: a law that would regulate the operations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and require them to register with the government. This proposal threatens to impede groups fighting for human rights, democracy and to foster the development of a stronger civil society in Russia. Foreign NGOs are particularly under threat.

The first rule for Russia watchers is to be suspicious of first drafts of parliamentary laws. These proposals may be unsolicited “initiatives from below” put forth by politicians eager to prove their loyalty to the Kremlin, even if the result may be embarrassing for their masters. At other times, they are clearly orchestrated “from above” to test the waters for change – often in an anti-democratic direction.

Schooling America: Achievement

After World War II, the United States felt secure as a world power and despite the vitriolic critics of the 1950s who complained that “Johnny can’t read,” the pressure upon educators was to provide special programs for special needs. The ordinary student was largely ignored and left to the temptations of tv, adolescent culture, and, occasionally, sports. Academic study did not occupy much of their energy.

The creation of a US Department of Education in 1979 was highly controversial. “Too much federal control, and we don’t need it,” Republicans claimed. However, the newly-elected Republican president, Ronald Reagan, did have to appoint a secretary and his appointee, Terrel Bell, attempting to save his department and his own job, asked his Utah neighbor, David Gardner, to chair a commission to look at the state of American education. Most improbably, this group’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, startled the country. Exposing the academic deficiencies of American youth, the report forced the country to pay attention to its schools. Few federal reports have had such a profound effect on the general population.

Reviews and “Best of” lists

Mencken: The American Iconoclast Reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle who called it “memorable and engaging”. Picked for the “Top Biographies” list compiled by The Denver Post. Also on that list, Cushing: A Life in Surgery Stephen Goddard at Historywire.com says that Mencken “may become the definitive work on the life of this luminous personality” […]

Erin McKean on the American Writer’s Thesaurus

William Safire calls The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus his “favorite new word-finder” and lists it as one of his “books on language” gift books for 2005. He goes on to say it is “chockablock with useful advice: “Novel manages to pack into five positive letters that ‘unusual,’ ‘unfamiliar,’ ‘unconventional,’ ‘untested,’ ‘untried,’ ‘unknown’ and ‘unorthodox’ have […]

The Undercover Economist goes off

It was another big week for The Undercover Economist LINK and Tim Harford. The Washington Times began the week calling UE a “fetching” book, and the week ended with an equally flattering review by Roger Lowenstein in his NYTimes Business column, “Off the Shelf,” on Sunday. In between, Harford was busy writing his own editorials. […]

Restless Giant on Slate.com’s Best Books of 2005 list

Slate.com picked Restless Giant by James Patterson for its Best Books of 2005 list today. David Greenberg, who writes Slate’s “History Lesson” column, made the pick – and plugged Patterson’s previous “tour de force” book, Grand Expectations along the way. Of note: Restless Giant seems to be the only history title to make the cut. […]

Great Civil War Books: An Author’s Reading List

by Bruce Levine When this blog’s editor invited me to name the ten best books on the Civil War, I blanched and took a pass. There are far too many really fine ones, and too many that I still haven’t read, for me to presume to make up that kind of list. But I do […]

Schooling America: Access

When the US Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation by race in public schools violated the US Constitution, the response from segregated school systems was not immediate. Rather, overcrowding was the issue most on the minds of the parents of the baby boomers.

The solution to the challenges posed by the Brown decision was “Access.’’ If the mother who wanted special attention could not get that, then she wanted a special program, preferably one for her child who undoubtedly was “gifted and talented.” Such a child had likely been identified by high performance on the intelligence and achievement standardized tests that were sweeping schoolrooms. These were the children who were introduced to the “new math” and other such subjects now being designed for schoolchildren by some of America’s most notable scholars, including those at the University of Illinois, who encouraged children to use “manipulables” while learning mathematics.

Roger Williams & Church-State Separation

These days, separation of church and state is in danger of becoming a hollow cliché. And on other days, it has been in danger of being regarded as a communist plot or, more recently, as a secularist one.

A look back at the life of the seventeenth-century founder of Rhode Island corrects these misunderstandings as well as gives a passionate freshness to the whole subject. Roger Williams was no communist, no secularist, and above all no huckster of empty slogans.

He was a deeply religious believer, in some ways even more religious than the Puritans who ejected him from Massachusetts in 1635. And he advocated religious liberty not because religion mattered so little but because it mattered so much.

“Torture” or “coercive interrogation”?

the Bush Administration has through multiple acts of ineptitude made it one of the central topics of debate in the world today. Louise Arbour, a former Canadian judge who is now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the United Nations on December 7 that “Governments are watering down the definition of torture, claiming that terrorism means established rules do not apply anymore.” The United Nations press release on her remarks further describes her as calling “on all Governments to reaffirm their commitment to the absolute prohibition of torture by condemning torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and prohibiting it in national law.” There can be little doubt that the “government” she is most trying to speak to is our own. And, not at all coincidentally, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is spending most of her time on her current tour of European capitals defending the United States with regard to the issue of “rendition,” the technical term for sending suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation. The most notorious case involves a German national who was undoubtedly the victim of a mis-identification by which he “was disappeared” to Afghanistan for five months and, he alleges, tortured in a CIA camp there before being abruptly released in the Albanian countryside and told that no one would believe his bizarre story. (The use of such a peculiar verb form of “disappear” is a legacy of Chile and Argentina, where suspected terrorists “were disappeared” by the fascist governments of those two countries in the 1970s and early ‘80s.) For good reason, the German government believed him, and Secretary of State Rice has apparently conceded the American error. She has also repeatedly insisted, as has President Bush, that the United States does not tolerate torture.

All Hail “Podcasting”: More also-rans for the 2005 WOTY

by Erin McKean You have probably heard by now (it’s one of the most-linked to items online) that the Oxford American Dictionary has selected “podcast” as the word of the year, or, as we refer to it in the lexicogging biz, the WOTY (pronounced “whoa-tee”, that is, it would be pronounced that way if anyone […]

Location, location

“Location’s very important. If you think about, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the location of the DMV in Washington, DC, is not important at all. Basically, if you want to deal with the DMV, you have to go where they put their offices. But Starbucks realized they don’t have that kind of power. They […]

The Education Carnival is now up

The Education Carnival is now up. Go read some excellent posts on American education. LINK