“Beat sweetener” was written all over John Broder’s April 30 New York Times profile of new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, “a woman of untamed energy, competitiveness and confidence in the boardroom and on a mountain trail.” … Read More
The Sick Madness of Tom Friedman’s Culture
What is going on in our community that a critical number of our columnists believe that every American military action in the Middle East is justifiable? … Read More
Salman Rushdie writes NYT op-ed on “political courage”
In an op-ed for the New York Times, author Salman Rushdie wonders why “physical bravery” has come to trump “moral courage” in the eyes of the public. “It’s a vexing time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world,” Rushdie writes.From the op-ed:It’s harder for us to see politicians, with the exception of Nelson Mandela and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as courageous these days. Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man’s hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another’s villain. We no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. When political leaders do take courageous steps — as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, then president, did in Libya by intervening militarily to support the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — there are as many who doubt as approve. Political courage, nowadays, is almost always ambiguous.Read more here.Continue Reading… … Read More
Reporting ‘Says’ Rather Than ‘Says It Believes’ Could Make a War of Difference
The front page of the New York Times had a very definitive headline on Syria and chemical weapons–but when you read the actual story, a much more ambiguous picture emerged. … Read More
Is there too much breast cancer “awareness”?
Facing the helplessness of disease – especially a disease that has a penchant for women, for our mothers and our friends and daughters – it feels good to go on the offensive. It feels good to believe we are somehow collectively “battling” it. It feels good enough, in fact, to have turned breast cancer into a big, Pepto Bismol-colored business, and to have driven unprecedented droves of women into prophylactic mastectomies.Yet reality is far more complicated than a jaunty ribbon on a lapel or the hopeful promise of “early detection.” And the key to unlocking the secrets of a pernicious disease will not be found in a pink bottle of nail polish — or even, very likely, in radical defensive surgery.That point is well-illustrated in author Peggy Orenstein’s blisteringly sensible cover story for the New York Times Magazine on “Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer.” (It will be appear in print this weekend, but is on the Times’ site now.) Orenstein knows well the nightmare of breast cancer. She was diagoned in 1995, at age 36. A decade and a half later, she was diagnosed again. And that span of time represents a massive shift in our cultural relationship with breast cancer – and a surprising new concern: what she calls “the dangers of overtreatment.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Democrats Can’t Blame Guns for ’94 Losses
There are perhaps plenty of lessons in the (most recent) Senate failure to pass even modest new restrictions/regulations on gun ownership. But one lesson needs to be resisted: The idea that passing a more expansive gun control law in 1994 came back to bite Democrats in the midterm elections. … Read More
North Korea Has Deliverable Nuclear Warhead! Or Maybe Not!
The panicky style of reporting on North Korea doesn’t seem to be changing much, if you glance at the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times this morning. But both pieces, if read carefully, undermine the alarmism–and make you wonder why the stories are on the front page. … Read More
