The New Republic

In Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court noted that a new law school could never, whatever its material endowment, acquire those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school. Such qualities, to name but a few, include reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. READ MORE >>

I know this is the week we are supposed to be thinking about 9/11. I am, and I'll get to it. But as a linguist, I cannot help also mourning that Alex the parrot died last week. He lived at Brandeis University in the lab of psychologist Irene Pepperberg. Many linguists think of language as the result of a genetic mutation unique to humans, but Alex challenged that idea. He knew over a hundred words, and was even given to saying things like "I love you" at the appropriate times! READ MORE >>

With respect to climate change, Congress seems stuck, at least for the near future. Here's an idea that might produce some action, and that might have a significant effect. READ MORE >>

These posts began with the 2006 US Open and here it is the day of the 2007 US Open women's final. This year, the exciting matches were few in number. The chief new tennis star is the charmingly theatrical young Serb, Novak Djokovic. Last year, I dismissed too readily another charming Serb, Jelena Jankovic, who one year will vault the Henin wall as Djokovic will the even taller one called Federer. READ MORE >>

In an earlier posting on Open University, I suggested that we have, as a society, strange, even bizarre, attitudes toward risk. That is, as is well known, we overestimate the risks of certain events, sometime to the point of panic, even as we underestimate others, to our severe detriment. READ MORE >>

The old Methodist Tabernacle on Martha's Vineyard was transformed into a high temple of liberalism on Saturday evening when Hillary Clinton came to address her core constituency. The Vineyard has become a campaign crossroads this week, with John Edwards passing through just before Hillary, and Barack Obama zooming in just afterwards. But Hillary's event had by far the highest profile, selling more than 2,000 tickets at $50 each, while Edwards ran a much smaller fundraiser, and Obama has limited himself to an exclusive, $1000 per person function. READ MORE >>

Ever since Americans discovered that Islam still mattered, writers and film-makers have worked to meet the demand for knowledge about the history of that faith. Unfortunately, many of these accounts have been tendentious, and at their most extreme, they present a wildly romanticized Islamic Golden Age as a rhetorical counterpoint to an ignorant and bigoted Medieval West. This Occidentalizing trend reached its height in the starry-eyed 2002 PBS documentary Empires of Faith, which is still widely used as a teaching tool and an instrument of interfaith dialogue. READ MORE >>

Acknowledging the uproar caused by its actions, the Anti-Defamation League has changed course, issuing a statement that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 "were indeed tantamount to genocide." READ MORE >>

Bostonians are watching with a certain morbid fascination a new controversy involving Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League that has nothing to do with Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer or Tony Judt. It concerns the question of whether there ever took place an Armenian genocide. The controversy began with the decision by Watertown, home of some 8000 Armenian-Americans, to withdraw from "No Place for Hate," an anti-discrimination program sponsored by the ADL, because the ADL has long refused to designate the Turkish masacre of the Armenians as genocide. READ MORE >>

"All the vulgar issues of life were a matter of indifference to this lofty soul, to whom nothing had yet afforded a profound emotion."--Stendhal, "The Rose and The Green" (tr. Richard Howard) READ MORE >>