Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns at colleges

Elaine Zendlovitz, at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, puts in long days as she teaches six courses at four institutions
November 20, 2007

By ALAN FINDER
Correction Appended

DEARBORN, Mich. — Professors with tenure or who are on a tenure track are now a distinct minority on the country’s campuses, as the ranks of part-time instructors and professors hired on a contract have swelled, according to federal figures analyzed by the American Association of University Professors.

To read the entire article from The New York Times, please click here.

A Western Union Empire Moves Migrant Cash Home

NEW YORK: Many of the customers at Armajeet Singh’s market in Queens are immigrants from South Asia.
November 21, 2007. By Jason DeParle
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — To glimpse how migration is changing the world, consider Western Union, a fixture of American lore that went bankrupt selling telegrams at the dawn of the Internet age but now earns nearly $1 billion a year helping poor migrants across the globe send money home.

To read the entire New York Times article, please click here.

Rambo and the G.O.P.

December 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

By BOB HERBERT
I don’t know if children should be allowed to watch the Republican presidential debates.

There’s so much talk of violence and mayhem as the solution to our ills. The candidates seem so eager to flex their muscles and engage the nation in conflict: Let’s continue the war in Iraq. Let’s show them what we’re made of in Iran. Let’s round up those immigrants and ship ’em back where they came from.

To read the entire Op ed piece in The New York Times, please click here.

A New Push to Roll Back ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

This pic of two gay military men was NOT part of the newspaper article.
This pic of hot Navy men was NOT part of the newspaper article.
November 30, 2007

By THOM SHANKER and PATRICK HEALY
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 — Marking the 14th anniversary of legislation that allowed gay men and lesbians to serve in the military but only if they kept their orientation secret, 28 retired generals and admirals plan to release a letter on Friday urging Congress to repeal the law.

“We respectfully urge Congress to repeal the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” the letter says. “Those of us signing this letter have dedicated our lives to defending the rights of our citizens to believe whatever they wish.”

To read the entire article from The New York Times, please click here.

Bush administration is 'incompetent'

Hagel: Bush administration is 'incompetent' and he would consider joining a Dem ticket
By Mark Memmott and Jill Lawrence
USA TODAY, Thursday 29 November 2007

"This is one of the most arrogant, incompetent administrations I've ever seen personally or ever read about," the always blunt and frequently quotable Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said yesterday during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

To read the entire article from USA Today, please click here.

The Twelfth of Never

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Twelfth of Never" is a popular song recorded by Johnny Mathis and later by Donny Osmond. The song's title comes from the popular expression "the 12th of Never," which is used as the date of a future occurrence that will never come to pass. In the case of the song, the 12th of Never is given as the date on which the singer will stop loving his beloved, thus indicating that he will always love her. The song draws a similar link between the cessation of love and a number of other events expected never to happen.

To read the entire selection from Wikipedia, please click here.

JUSTICES, 6-3, LEGALIZE GAY SEXUAL CONDUCT

June 27, 2003
THE SUPREME COURT: HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICES, 6-3, LEGALIZE GAY SEXUAL CONDUCT IN SWEEPING REVERSAL OF COURT'S '86 RULING
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The Supreme Court issued a sweeping declaration of constitutional liberty for gay men and lesbians today, overruling a Texas sodomy law in the broadest possible terms and effectively apologizing for a contrary 1986 decision that the majority said ''demeans the lives of homosexual persons.'' The vote was 6 to 3.

Gays are ''entitled to respect for their private lives,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. ''The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.''

To read the entire front-page article in The New York Times, please click here.

Fahrenheit 9/11 Michael Moore movie (2004)

Review Summary
Mixing sober outrage with mischievous humor and blithely trampling the boundary between documentary and demagoguery, Michael Moore takes wholesale aim at the Bush administration, whose tenure has been distinguished, in his view, by unparalleled and unmitigated arrogance, mendacity and incompetence. Of course, your estimation of the movie will largely depend on whether you share this view, but this unabashedly partisan collage of interviews, archival video clips and Mr. Moore's trademark agitprop stunts is nonetheless his most disciplined and powerful film to date.

Mr. Moore is a prodigious talker and a wily showman, but he is also a good listener, and when he visits his hometown, Flint, Mich., to speak to the mother of a marine killed in Iraq, the film achieves an eloquence that its most determined critics will have a hard time dismissing. The movie's cheap shots and inconsistencies may frustrate its admirers, but by now we should have learned to appreciate Mr. Moore for what he is. He is rarely subtle, often impolite, frequently tendentious and sometimes self-contradictory. He is also a credit to the Republic. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times

To read the entire New York Times movie review, please check here.

Chinese Art, in One Man’s Translation

September 7, 2007
Art Review | Zhang Huan

By HOLLAND COTTER
When the exhibition “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” opened at Asia Society and P.S. 1 in 1998, it caused a stir because it both did and did not meet expectations of contemporary art from China.

The show had plenty of Mao portraits, but they came with jokes: Mao behind bars, Mao in Pop colors, with beauty marks and a flower in his teeth. There was also calligraphy, but it was messed-up calligraphy: illegible, computerized, used to write nonsense characters, fake language.

To read the entire New York Times article, please click here.

We are all uninsured now

LAURENCE J. KOTLIKOFF

By Laurence J. Kotlikoff | August 28, 2007

BIG NUMBERS, like 45 million uninsured Americans, are hard to grasp. But that number came home to me at a recent conference. The keynote speaker was former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Her topic was our healthcare system, and her message was personal and anguished.

The gist was that even she lives in constant fear of major uninsured health bills. Not her own -- those of her son. He can't afford insurance because his son -- her grandchild -- has a preexisting condition.

To read the entire article from The Boston Globe, please click here.

Bilbao, 10 Years Later

September 23, 2007

By DENNY LEE
A light patter bounced off the titanium fish scales of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as a tour bus pulled up beside “Puppy,” Jeff Koons's 43-foot-tall topiary terrier made of freshly potted pansies. A stream of tourists fanned out across the crisp limestone plaza, tripping over each other as they rushed to capture the moment on camera. After the frisson of excitement dimmed, they made their way down a gently sloping stairway and into the belly of the museum, paying 10.50 euros to see the work of an artist that most had never heard of.

To read the entire article in The New York Times, please click here.

You’ve Seen the Movies; Now Tour the Locations

September 23, 2007
Comings and Goings

By HILARY HOWARD
Cinephiles in New York have a new way to take in the sites featured in classic movie and television scenes. This month, On Location Tours and New York Water Taxi (www.nywatertaxi.com) started to offer the New York TV and Movie Tour on the Water. The trip begins with a brief walk through South Street Seaport (“Annie Hall”) before boarding the water taxi to visit the Brooklyn and Manhattan waterfronts (“The French Connection”), Ellis Island (“The Godfather Part II”) and the Brooklyn Bridge, above (“Saturday Night Fever”). The tour ends with a walk through Battery Park (“The Royal Tenenbaums”). New York actors lead the two-and-a-half-hour tours, which take place every Thursday at 4 p.m. and cost $40; $30 for those over 65 and under 12 (www.screentours.com).

Worshiping Paris

October 7, 2007

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
From the outside, St.-François-Xavier Church just might be the ugliest church in Paris. A 19th-century hulk, it drips with decades of brownish-gray grime. There is not one memorable feature on its facade. Although the gold-domed Invalides with Napoleon's Tomb is only a few blocks away, St.-François-Xavier stands on a loud, traffic-clogged intersection leading to the Montparnasse train station, facing some of the worst of recent Paris architecture.


To read the entire article from The New York Times, please click here.

Most Experience or Enough Experience?

The slogan Richard Nixon’s campaign against John F. Kennedy hinged on what he learned as vice president.
November 25, 2007

By PATRICK HEALY
In 1960, Richard Nixon ran for president against John F. Kennedy on a slogan that had powerful resonance for cold war America: “Experience Counts.” Nixon had been vice president for eight years, a senator for two, and a House member for four. Kennedy had been a senator for eight years and a House member for six, and was also a war hero and the scion of a politically powerful family.


To read the entire New York Times piece, please click here.

A Defender of Bush’s Power, Gonzales Resigns

August 28, 2007
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced his resignation on Monday, ending a stormy tenure at the Justice Department that was marked by repeated battles with Congress over whether he had allowed his intense personal loyalty to President Bush to overwhelm his responsibilities to the law.

To read the entire front-page story from The New York Times, please click here.

and added April 4, 2008: to hear an audio interview from NPR, please click here.

This is blog posting #150!!

Taking Marriage Private

By STEPHANIE COONTZ Op Ed Contributor
November 26, 2007, Olympia, Wash.

Why do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

To read the entire article in The New York Times, please click here.

The DNA Age--Seeking Columbus’s Origins, With a Swab

October 8, 2007

By AMY HARMON
BARCELONA, Spain — When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus’s humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.

To read the entire article from The New York Times, please click here.