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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 […]
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. […]
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. […]
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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’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. Go read some excellent posts on American education. LINK
Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Carleton Washburne, embody the Adjustment period from 1920 to 1954. Mitchell with her friend Caroline Pratt founded the City and Country School in New York City as her children entered school in the 1920s. Mitchell had tried unsuccessfully to break the formalism of the New York City schools, and having inherited family money, she decided to establish a school of her own design. Its 1922 program of arts, play, shop, rest, as well as a little reading, is revealed in this chart showing the “Greenwich Village School Program, 1922 -1923.”
The feature article at Tech Central Station today is a wonderful review by Arnold Kling of Tim Harford’s book The Undercover Economist. Kling does not shrink from making the “inevitable comparison with Freakonomics.” Kling gives his “enthusiastic recommendation to The Undercover Economist” over its best-selling rival. (Click HERE to read Kling’s review of Freakonomics). Kling […]
The central metaphor of Richard Pacelle’s review of Advice and Consent by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal in the Law & Politics Book Review is just too entertaining to avoid posting. At the appropriate age (and, truth be told, maybe a little beyond that), I would anxiously anticipate the second or third week of the […]
I couldn’t help but notice – try as I might to resist – this story from a few weeks ago in which Madonna, aka Esther, claimed that she’d likely get less grief from the media if she had become a Nazi instead of devoting herself to kabbalah. It made me think of this image from […]
Marginal Revolution reports that the first signed copy of Freakonomics has been sold for $610. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and original owner of the book, has donated the proceeds of the Ebay auction to Levitt’s favorite charity, Smile Train, and Levitt has matched that amount with a donation of his own.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina exposed an array of glaring deficiencies in America’s infrastructure – the slow response from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and the fragile state of the New Orleans levees are perhaps the most prominent. But, according to Jill Quadagno, the most imposing challenge brought to light by Katrina […]