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A good piece on the creepy racial subtext of that Malcolm Gladwell article. (I can stop posting about that any time I want to. Really.)
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"I mentioned a little while back that it’s raining men here. The percentage of male students here has been climbing for the last several years, and the recession seems to be giving it a conspicuous boost. Male students are still a minority, though mostly in the over-21 age group. In the traditional-age cohort, it’s almost even. I’ve asked our local IR people to run some numbers, since we have several trends going on simultaneously, and I’m not sure how they’re related: our students are getting younger, more male, and more non-white. I’m not sure if, say, ‘more male’ is mostly a function of ‘younger,’ or if the trends are independent. Anecdotally, it seems like the age shift is driving everything else, but I couldn’t prove it at this point."
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"Last week Leon Kass, chairman of the Council of Bioethics under President Bush, took to the podium to deliver the Jefferson Lecture of the National Endowment for the Humanities — an event I did not go to, though it was covered by one of IHE’s intrepid reporters.
My reluctance to attend suggests that, without noticing it, I have come to accept Kassâs best-known idea, âthe wisdom of repugnance.â There is, alas, all too little evidence I am getting any wiser with age — but my visceral aversion to hearing a Bush appointee talk about human values is inarguable."
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"âThe greatest threat to Americaâs fiscal health is not Social Security,â President Barack Obama said in a March speech at the White House. âItâs not the investments that weâve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nationâs balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. Itâs not even close.â
The question weâre now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers."
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"There has to be a better way – you’d think, at any rate. But the MSDS is lawyer language, when you get right down to it, and there’s the problem. Trying to insulate everyone from liability is not something that can be done simultaneously with trying to inform people in case of an emergency. Very few chemists, in my experience, spend much time with these forms at all, preferring to get their information from almost any other source. There has to be a better way."