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(01/25/05 11:00am)
President Bush the Elder famously proclaimed his distaste for "the vision thing" when it came to presidential leadership. The Elder was a consummate Washington insider -- congressman, director of central intelligence, vice president. He was a man who knew where to find the levers of power, who held them and who knew how to get them pulled. He worked his people and he pulled the levers and expected the largely effective results to satisfy the nation when it came time for his re-election.
(01/10/05 11:00am)
It's difficult to capture the magnitude of the Asian tsunami disaster with words. For that, it takes pictures.
(11/05/04 11:00am)
A funny thing happened this Wednesday. An unexpected thing. An amazing thing, even. The 2004 presidential election ended well.
(10/18/04 9:00am)
It would make for a catchy lead if I could say I was surprised, shocked or even disappointed by the article "Dartmouth employees open wallets for Kerry" (October 11, The Dartmouth). Those would all be better leads than my actual reaction to that article, which went something along the lines of: "No duh." But I won't lie for the sake of rhetorical effect. Anyone who couldn't predict that "Dartmouth employees open wallets for Kerry" is either entirely unfamiliar with the state of American higher education or conducting a very effective campaign of self-delusion. That the hallowed halls of academia suffer from leftward tilt is self-evident, and last week's article is just another data point to that effect.
(10/05/04 9:00am)
It has become obvious that Dan Rather and his cabal at CBS News were participants in one of the greatest journalistic dupes in recent years. The question that remains is: How did this happen? I can think of two possible explanations -- one is unflattering, the other is worse. Either Rather and his staff are massively incompetent, or they were willing participants in a scheme of public deception -- pick your poison.
(08/10/04 9:00am)
In 1989, when Major League Baseball announced that all-time hits leader Pete Rose would be banned from the game for life as punishment for gambling on baseball, the phrase "tragedy" got tossed around a lot. One of the game's all-time great players " known to the fans as Charlie Hustle for the effort he put into each and every play " was officially a pariah, and would not be enshrined in the Hall of Fame: "tragedy."
(07/22/04 9:00am)
I must make a disclaimer up-front: I don't know much about pets. The only pets I had growing up were goldfish, and those aren't particularly exciting pets. About the only consistently exciting thing they can be counted on to do is die, and the intrigue of that wears off after the second or third time.
(07/08/04 9:00am)
When a friend asked me last weekend who I expected to win the upcoming presidential election, I almost caught myself by surprise when the words "coin flip" came out of my mouth. My instinctive answer was a bit puzzling because I don't expect the vote to be close -- I'd lay money on a margin of more than five percent for the winner. The real question is whether it will be Bush or Kerry on the happy side of that margin, and the more I think about it the more sure I am that I don't know the answer.
(06/24/04 9:00am)
The late, great futurist and humorist Douglas Adams once described the vastness of the universe like this: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." So, compared to the vastness of space, a piddling 408 feet doesn't seem like a big deal.
(02/09/04 11:00am)
Barely four weeks ago, I wrote in this column that voters had "fallen in love with Howard Dean. . . He's the man to beat in the Democratic primary." I believed it, too. If you handed me a Bible, I'd have sworn on it. If you offered to bet, I'd have shaken your hand, called you a sucker and prepared to pocket your money.
(01/19/04 11:00am)
When President Bush unveiled his major space initiative last week -- including plans for NASA to return to the moon by 2020 and construct a lunar base that could function as a launchpad for future manned exploration of Mars and the solar system -- he invoked the words of astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon: "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return." In addition to proposing a literal return to the moon, Bush no doubt hopes for a more political return to the success of the Apollo program and the political dividends that the United States' first lunar landings paid for NASA and the presidency.
(01/07/04 11:00am)
Election years are serious to the point of self-parody. Candidates stand on the stump, fix the crowds with their best presidential stare and proceed to beg for votes, money or -- even better -- both. Our nation's future hangs in the balance, or so warns each party's mass mailing. Television pundits, breathless, pounce on each new batch of polls to divine their cosmic significance. Hyperbole -- from Gephardt's "miserable failure" to Bush's "mission accomplished" to Kerry's f-word -- abounds. That's a lot of seriousness to handle, especially after a 2003 filled to the brim with pre-election moving and shaking.
(11/13/03 11:00am)
Larry Flynt likes to portray himself as an activist. After all, in 1988 he won a landmark court case that affirmed First Amendment protection for pornography. During the Clinton impeachment, Flynt showed his commitment to public service by famously offering $1 million to anyone who could expose a Republican member of Congress as an adulterer. Just this year, Flynt's name was among the hundred-plus candidates vying for governor in the California recall. None of this, of course, changes the fact that Mr. Flynt's day job is as a pornographer. But he wants you to know that he's a pornographer who cares.
(10/29/03 11:00am)
You've never heard of Bob Thompson, and it's a shame. America ought to laud Bob Thompson as a hero: he's a retired entrepreneur who tried to donate almost a quarter billion dollars to improve education in inner-city Detroit. For this, he deserves praise and laurels. Instead, Thompson was run out of town by Detroit's teachers' union. Try to imagine that for a moment -- it's so astoundingly petty, and so hurtful, not just to Thompson, but to the children he tried to help.
(10/16/03 9:00am)
Clocks in Hanover read nine p.m. when it happened this Tuesday night, but halfway across the world in China's Gobi Desert it was nine a.m. on a clear Wednesday morning. There a streak of exhaust climbing up through the sky marked the event, as the Long March rocket hurtled towards orbit with a 38-year-old Chinese fighter pilot aboard. Only moments after liftoff, China's official news agency trumpeted that "the time has come to realize the 1,000-year dream of flying dreamed by the sons and daughters of China," as the first Chinese astronaut rocketed into space.
(10/02/03 9:00am)
In journalism, stories are currency. They're what journalists produce, what they're paid for, what they're judged by. A scoop can make a career; getting scooped can destroy one. No wonder then that journalists chase stories with the single-minded tenacity of race dogs chasing the mechanical rabbit.
(09/26/03 9:00am)
Tension filled the air when I went home to Michigan for the summer. Students, policy makers and the academic establishment were all strained to the breaking point, waiting for something to pop. At the end of June, something did: the Supreme Court handed down a split decision on the use of racial preferences at the University of Michigan. The immediate stalemate over, both the University and its critics tried to claim victory while sifting through the legal debris. But by the time I left Michigan to return to Dartmouth, the pressure was building again, and both sides were rearming. After another compromise verdict from the Supreme Court on race in the academy, it won't be long before the battle over preferences erupts again.
(05/21/03 9:00am)
You plagiarized a seminar paper, failed your final exam, walked out of the makeup exam and filed a lawsuit against your college, what would you get? "Expelled" would be a good first guess, but wrong. Apparently, if you're a criminal justice graduate student at Coppin State College, you get a master's degree.
(05/14/03 9:00am)
In retrospect, all the news wasn't fit to print
(05/07/03 9:00am)
The year: 1978. The place: Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital, one of the largest computer manufacturers of the industry's infancy, has just created its latest computer and is looking for buyers. One Digital employee tries a new way to advertise: he sends an e-mail to every West Coast user of Arpanet, the forerunner of today's internet. Spam is born.