The other day, my girlfriend (who’s not a math fan) sent me a link to a new New York Times post by Steven Strogatz, an applied math professor at Cornell who is writing a blog that will, over the next few weeks, give readers a quick tutorial on math, “from pre-school to grad school.” Strogatz … Read more
Today President Obama announced “that he would convene a half-day bipartisan health care session at the White House to be televised live this month, a high-profile gambit that will allow Americans to watch as Democrats and Republicans try to break their political impasse.” The announcement, which came during a Super Bowl pre-game show, is noteworthy … Read more
Perhaps I’m harping too much on this news-reading thing, but Yale is currently in a fervor over cost-cutting plans to scrap dining hall subscriptions of the New York Times. One Yalie said that he “had a slight heart attack”—and I thought having a heart attack was pretty binary—when he saw plans to terminate the $50,000-a-year … Read more
So, we finally see the controversial Tim Tebow ad… and…. this is what everyone’s been fighting over? Transcript: Pam: I call him my miracle baby. He almost didn’t make it into this world. I can remember so many times when I almost lost him. It was so hard. Well he’s all grown up now, and … Read more
Last summer, Sam Harris, one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, released a broadside in the New York Times against Obama’s appointee to head the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins. Collins, in addition to heading the Human Genome Project, has been a vocal advocate for the reconciliation of science and faith — indeed, … Read more
The Economist chimed in on US-Sino relations with its cover this week, presenting a nicely balanced look at how to proceed with a resurgent and somewhat reluctant China: Rather than ganging up on China in an effort to “contain” it, the West would do better to get China to take up its share of the … Read more
For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me: It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a … Read more
Ross Douthat had an admirable column earlier this week arguing that, because we don’t really have strong evidence about the effectiveness of abstinence-only versus comprehensive sex-ed, we should just leave the issue to the states. Douthat says, accurately, that this battle is about “community values” more than public policy anyway. And, he concludes, values should … Read more
John Judis of the New Republic thinks that President Obama has trouble with the white working-class because he’s a yuppie at heart. I think that this is definitely one of Obama’s major problems with this demographic, but I’d add that his yuppie-ness combines with a couple of other factors to create the problem. Specifically, I … Read more
An excellent op-ed in the Crimson today by Hemi Gandhi criticizes Harvard and its students for having a somewhat superficial commitment to green energy. The criticisms of Harvard are, on the whole, more compelling. If the Environmental Science and Public Policy is really so narrowly focused, as Gandhi says, then it’s not the students who … Read more