Check out Jon Yip’s post, “The Asian Ceiling” for a review of a Kara Miller’s Boston Globe editorial about Asian discrimination in the college admission process. Asians are the new Jews, Miller explains: In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at … Read more
Yale admissions office reader Kara Miller wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe yesterday alleging discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions. She cited a study from Thomas Espenshade, Princeton sociologist, who found that Asians on average needed an extra 140 SAT points to compete with white students. Surprise! I don’t think anyone will find it unexpected … Read more
Will Leiter gives us an overview of Obama’s “bipartisan summit” strategy and asks, in effect, will it work? Some smart people whom I respect say that this is capitulation and error (see Yglesias’ “doomed strategy” post). That viewpoint conforms nicely with the basic stance on the left since Scott Brown’s election, which has been that … Read more
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