I live in a gentrified part of the Western Addition or as someone I know calls the neighborhood, I live in the DMV Heights.
Neighborhoods like Stern Grove are what I like about San Francisco. You have these little villages that are in the middle of the city and no one visits them! One friend describes SF as the "incorporated villages of San Francisco"
I never liked Heeb. My own part in the Jew v. Jew debate is to be very turned off by the practioners of "Kitschy Judaism". I define "kitschy Judaism" as basically turning 5000 years of history, culture, and philosophy into a bunch on jokes. I love Jewish humor but there is more to Judaism than Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, and the Borscht Belt.
Now that I live on the West Coast, I am told that "East Coast Reform" equals "West Coast Conservative" so things might be even more lax here. There might also be a generational gap. I notice that a lot of Jews who belong to the Millenial Generation are getting tattoos (Lena Dunham is the most obvious celeb example). A lot of them talk about "reclaiming". This strikes me as odd. How can you reclaim what was never ours to begin with? I'd rather they just say they want tattoos. I would take that argument as being more intellectually honest. Though I know my views on Jews and tattoos is not going to change the minds of anyone. If someone wants a tattoo, they are going to get one.
As for the comment section (and keep in mind that I know nothing about your politics or whether you are Jewish or not), I have a theory that Republican/Politically Conservative Jews have a feeling of being an embittered minority within a minority. It seems like every Presidential election brings about the same posts about whether Jews will stop voting Democratic this year. Every Presidential election reveals the answer to be no. If you are among the 20 percent of Jews who are partisan Republicans, this must be really frustrating. Also Orthodox Jews are becoming more common. I grew up in a very Jewish suburb. When I was around, the town was largely Reform/secular, now the town is much more Orthodox.
I suppose I would have done stuff differently as well but I can't say what my record would look like if I was a high school senior in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2012, etc. Based on what my 1998 record was (read: all over the map), I can only guess that I would not get into my alma mater if applying today. There are too many perfect candidates. You never can completely tell but even back in 1998, I was a lucky long-shot who got in.
I applied to a lot of colleges because of my all over the map grades, good extracurriculurs, and SAT scores. This turned me into the waitlist king.
So yes, it is all part of the arms race and I went to a very academically competitive high school (professional suburbs of New York). It is probably even more arms race now.
Normally, they are a very good on-line Jewish magazine* especially for non neo-cons like myself (and most Jews) but every now and then they have to publish an article like this and I sigh along with the neocons.
*Though I do get angry at the anti-Reform Judaism sentiment that often gets expressed in the comments. Says the proud Reform Jew.
Another problem is that college applications are a lot more competitive now.
I was admitted to a Tier I private liberal arts college in 1998 and graduated in 2002. I doubt that my high school record would get me admitted now. Most likely I'd be somewhere in the Tier 2 range. A lot of my cohort feel the same way.
Also it is impossible to determine what a marketable major is or is not. A person can major in comp lit, suffer for a few years, get an entry level advertising gig, and then really start to bloom, etc. Also I imagine many teachers come from Tier 2 schools. Should teachers study the subjects they teach?
I think this is a large part of our current educational-debt-employment problem, the fact that employers do not want to train anyone for anything.
I am all for having a mass educated class. However, I think it is a problem when employers use college graduation as a short hand for competence. I've certainly had jobs that said "BA required" but could have been done by a non-college graduate.
A return to apprenticeship for a lot of jobs including many business jobs like marketing and accounting would be a good thing. I don't see this happening though.
You can major in anything and go to law school. No extra courses necessary!
As opposed to my friends who decided to go into social work, therapy (psychological and phyiscal), etc. They needed to make up a lot of courses before grad school.
From what I remember, the hard part about Japanese universities is getting. Once you are admitted to the top universities, it is supposed to be smooth sailing and the old boys' network guarantees your career. This obviously happens a bit or a lot in the United States as well especially among certain schools known for creating fiercly devoted alumni but it might be more accute in Asia).
I would agree with your statement on the US system encouraging more work but that could also be part of the problem especially with the whole costs and student debt crisis. In many (or most) other countries, law and medicine are studied as undergrad subjects. This means that a person has more time in the field as a practioner to earn their income and less debt. They don't have undergrad debt plus law school or med school or business school debt piled on top.
There are some benefits to allowing law school to be a bit like grad school. I was allowed to kick around in art for most of my 20s and then head to law school when I realized my theatre career was probably not going to bloom. But in terms of debt and getting a late start into careers, it is not so good.
There are a lot more people who make their livings paying piano than one dozen. People still enjoy going to concerts and a dozen concert pianists could not fill the need for all the live performances.
As a former theatre person, I can also tell you that the vast majority of my artisitc friends understand the career prospects. Don't get me wrong, we all think or thought it would be very nice to make a living doing our art but I don't think most of us expected to. People create art or write or perform because they need to, it is in their blood.
The point and purpose of university is to create a well-educated person. There is such a thing as stuyding a subject out of love and passion, not for cost-benefit analysis on post-graduation employment prospects. The world does not need to be filled with STEM people only.
How do we outpace our foreign counterparts? Keep in mind that I was a arts and humanities student at a small, liberal arts college, not a large research university. We had science majors but no engineers, no business faculty (unless you count economics), etc. Also no graduate students. The school is a name recognized and considered elite (both in terms of being associated with the old WASP aristocracy and now for toughness in admission.academic). However, it is not a research university. Professors are largely at the school to teach. All of my classes were 15-30 students. Sometimes less. Basically, I am far away from the world of research and engineers.
Most foreign countries do not have the sheer number of universities that the U.S. does. I am not even sure what our closest competitor does. Latin American countries seem to go for universities that make Ohio State look tiny. Some Mexican universities have hundreds of thousands of students. I'd venture to say that it is hard to produce real learning in those environments.
I am not sure how ranking works in most foreign countries. I know that every country has their elite universities. Canada has McGill and Toronto, The UK has OxBridge, Japan has Tokyo, Waseda, Keio, and Osaka. But I don't know how the rest of their universities rank. The U.S. seems more clear in terms of Ivy, Comparable to Ivy (Stanford, Notre Dame, Chicago, MIT, CalTech) Small Liberal Arts elite (Wesleyan, Amherst, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnel, etc), Public Ivies (the UCs especially Cal, Michigan-Ann Arbor), and so on. The U.S. probably has more elite colleges and universities than some nations have universities.
Though now people are talking about whether the Ivys or comparable schools are worth it because of the cost. A lot of people say go to community college and then a state school close to home if you can to save on expense. My general reaction is contrarian to this. I think if someone gets into a Harvard, an MIT, an Emory or Duke, a Colby, etc., they should go. Those schools do offer excellent educations and yes the name matters on a resume for better or for worse.
Though everyone likes to point out the manager they know who only hires kids from big public schools because "those kids worked their way through college" while a private school grad had "mommy and daddy pay for school".
Completely tangental but my non-American friends think that our educational system is complete madness. As far as I can tell, private university education is a rarity in many countries outside the U.S. or often considered inferior. The exceptions I can think of being Japan (Waseda, Keio) and France (the grandes ecoles).
I wonder whether Canada or the United Kingdom even have private universities.
One of my European friends thought that schools like Harvard and my undergrad (smal, liberal arts college in the Northeast) were for-profit because they were private. I blew his mind a bit by saying they were private and had large endowments but were still officially non-profit/501(c)(3) institutions. He seemed to think that Harvard and Yale were for-profit in the same way that the University of Phoenix is for-profit.
I know of couples who stay married for these reasons and also maintaining a lifestyle.
We had a family friend who used to be a local broker for a branch of one of the big investment companies. This was in an upper-middle class professional suburb. He used to say that lots of couples would come in after their kids left the nest and say they wanted to split up and asked him to do the math about lifestyle and splitting assets. His response was to many of the couples is that divorcing would probably lead to needing to step down in their lifestyle/comfort level.
So not quite the same as getting married* but somewhat close.
*That being said, I have a morbid fascination with the wedding announcements in the New York Times. They always read like a mingling of the SAT scores, Rhodes Scholarships, Fullbright Fellowships, etc. I often wonder if the first date read more like a job interview.
I did not know that Kenneth Baranagh and Helena Bonham Carter were ever an item.
I also never made it to Order of the Pheonix movie. I've read all the books but have a bit of a dissenting view on Harry Potter. I can see why they are good and successful but am a bit perplexed by the mega-success that they have received. They are still much better than the other books that are mega-successful that perplex me Hunger Games (not as original as everyone claims), Twlight (nuff said), and 50 Shades of Grey (even more nuff said).
Part of this could be an occupational hazard from my grad school days (Theatre directing with a lot of classes on dramatic literature thrown in. My undergrad course load was also heavily literature and theatre history based), I tend towards work and more active reading than escapism and tend to get annoyed at things that most people seem to not notice or ignore. My musician friends have made similar comments about concerts. In terms of the classic C.S. Lewis essay an Experiment in Criticism, I am firmly in what he calls a literary reader.)
Harry Potter was cute enough but I got quickly annoyed at the repeated jokes about musicians not being able to dress normally. The whole "What house are you in?" aspect of the fandom perplexes me as well especially people who claim to be all about House Slytherin. I always want to state to House Slytherin fanatics, "You realize that they are a barely disguised analogy for the Nazis, right? And J.K. Rowling is basically telling kids that Nazism and caring about blood purity are very bad things." I imagine this will not go over well.
That being said, the movies are not bad. They were well cast and I'm impressed that they picked kids who really were able to grow into their roles and were generally good to great actors.
I would possibly disagree on the respectable part though I think that it is more universal than related to men.
There seem to be signs of this changing with books and articles coming out on what it means to be single and the joys of living alone/going solo. However, we still feel incredibly odd about people who don't marry unless they look like George Clooney. Look at all the needless speculation about Elena Kagan when she was in the nominee process for the Supreme Court about her unmarried status. I also find that most of the articles are focused on the one percent or close to. One recent article in the Atlantic was called "All the Single Ladies" and the author wrote about how she was borrowing a house from another single lady friend to write the article and why marry if that was her life. How many people can borrow a house in the Hamptons? I suspect being single feels a lot worse if you were 35-38 and living in a tiny studio and temping.
I'm 31, male, and unmarried and feeling weird. Most of my friends (male and female) are married, have kids, are expecting kids, own property, etc and are very much tied down. To be fair, most of them did not spend most of their 20s trying for a career in theatre but went straight to grad school or the corporate world. Part of me feels very far behind and I like I am now just doing stuff that all my friends got out of their systems at 24. The current economic situation does not help much either.
Even though I come from the socio-economic-geographic background where it is perfectly acceptable to get married in your late 30s for the first time, I still think people view me as odd for living alone at 31. And I'm in San Francisco! I have a friend who is slightly older but lives in Vermont. He says that people there view him as downright freakish for not being married at his age.
The problem is possibly because we don't know how to phrase or talk about being single without seeing it as meaning "actively searching for a relationship". There have been times in the past few years when I have done very active dating and times when school and work demands were just too much for me to do anything social.
I also enjoy Emma Thompson. If anything, she introduced Stephen Fry to Hugh Laurie.
Though my favorite Emma Thompson movie is Dead Again. This is possibly the only movie in the "so bad, it's good" camp that I have ever really enjoyed. It helps that the plot is completely insane but everyone goes at it with gusto and the cast is A plus: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brangnah, Derek Jacobi, Robin Williams (as a defrocked psychologist now working the graveyard shift at a meat locker), and Matt Dillon.
And I originally thought that was a picture of Njinsky until reading further down.
I don't know if there is a clear answer here except that this is one of the many areas that shows the contradictions and hypocrisies of the human condition. The previous sentence was probably a bit too grand.
I know a lot of women who dislike Zooey Deschanel. They seem to dislike her for being too girly and being the current crush d'jour for many men or at least a certain kind of young man. Yet these same women have huge crushes on Ryan Gosling or post pictures on facebook of Ewan MacGregor in nothing but a kilt*.
Yet I have never heard a woman question me for my crush on Maggie Gyllenhaal. And I have a very big crush on her. Most women seem to find my crush on Maggie to be a sign of good taste. I'm guessing that this is because Maggie is seen as a serious actor and very intelligent**. However, as far as I can tell, Maggie Gyllenhaal has done more publicity shots in sexy underwear than Zooey Deschanel. Mary-Louise Parker is another very attractive women in the free from complaint category and I am guessing for similar reasons.
In the end, there is probably no rhyme or reason to this and looking at someone for being aesthetically pleasing is part of our biological programming. I would say that the vast majority of people do oogle someone at one point or another and feel jealousy when someone else gets oogled because it makes them feel undesirable.
*I have never been able to understand why kilts are supposed to be attractive. Perhaps this is because my ancestry is about as far from manly Celt as humanly possible. I come from firm Litvak stock with genetic dispositions towards being short. I would feel damn silly and self-conscious wearing a kilt even if Maggie herself told me to.
**I don't know whether Zooey Deschanel is intelligent or not but she does not seem to be perceived as such in the media. Maggie Gyllenhaal seems to have a reputation for being an independent minded actor who takes roles for usually non-monetary reasons.
One of my favorite Con Law quotes comes from Chief Justice Warren Burger (or his clerks). The quote is "The Constitution can not change social prejudice but neither can it accept it."
The case involved a mother who lost custody of her child after moving in with her black boyfriend in late 1970s or early 1980s.
This is largely my view. I don't think it is possible to create laws that say "Don't be racist", "Don't be anti-Semitic", "Don't be homophobic". What is possible is creating laws that do not allow bigots and racists to act on their prejudiced tendicies and these laws are required by the 14th Amendment in my opinion and based on my observations, they seem to work more often than not. There will probably never be a world that is bigot or prejudice free sadly but the we do seem to be rapidbly decreasing it. The Gay Rights movement made legislative gains in a much shorter time period than the civil rights movement. They still have far to go.
I have a very expansive view of free speech and do believe that people have the right to express their views no matter how horrible. I basically like the idea of the First Amendment working as a "Please feel free to shoot yourself in the foot" act. I disagree with my European and Canadian friends on hate speech clauses enough that they do look at me as a weirdo American*
As a Jewish-American, I can tell you that I grew up in a much less anti-Semitic United States than my grandparents and possibly my parents. My grandfather got into Columbia because his last name began with B and this saved him from the quota system. I did not have to worry that my last name ever prevented me from getting in anywhere. Nor have I ever seen a sign on a public pool or other facility that said something like "No Blacks. No Jews" and these signs were not too uncommon as little as 50-60 years ago.
The South was bad on civil rights. In my opinion, they are still very bad and are the creators of my view that State's Rights is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Some places in the South choose to close down their public schools instead of desegregating. I don't see how a democratic society can function and allow such recalitrance. As far as I can tell, the South will probably need dragging on gay marriage as well.
I don't really care what is in LBJ's heart or not though I am slogging through the 4th volume of the Caro biography. He was far from a saint but I don't really care about sainthood. He did give us some damn good legislation.
The road to justice is long, slow, painful, and possibly an impossible human endevour. That doesn't mean we should not try. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better"-Samuel Beckett.
Arbitration is good when done between parties with equal bargaining power. It is not good when done between parties with uneven bargaining power like the employee-employeer relationship or in the most recent Supreme Court case between A Telecommunications Corporation and a customer. It is generally the right-wing of the court that votes to expand the scope of binding arbitration.
There are always going to be cases like you described. They happened before I was born and will sadly happen after I die most likely. There are also plenty of cases when justice is done right and injured parties to get redress for their wrongs whether for injury, domestic violence (an injunction), employment discrimination, a violation of property-rights (easements). Most cases are not easy. There are plenty of cases where someone could have a colorable claim for say age discrimination but the defendant-employer could also have a colorable reason for terminating the employment of the plaintiff. How do we decide the hard cases is a tricky issue of jurisprudence but it is one I think society is better and less violent for leaving to the courts?
If you honestly believe what you said above, I have no idea about how to find a middle ground with you. You are not presenting a picture of anyworld that I want to live in and are being plain silly with your Canadian example.
I don't think that my liberal policies will result in a perfect utopia where no one misbehaves whether intentionally or negligently. Human nature is not perfect and we all have our contradictions and faults. However, I think my policies will provide redress when injury occurs.
This is sort of a philosophical exercise for me as a lawyer. I can't go into full details because of confidentiality rules and ethics but I see a lot of e-mails by very smart people who should know better, they are basically breaking the law and do not care. I've seen it in product liability cases, antitrust cases involving the few clear violations like Horizontal Price Fixing and Territorial Divisions, Employment Discrimination cases, etc.
The perfect would be a society where these things do not happen but this perfect world does not exist. The good is having laws that say employment discrimination is illegal and provides a remedy for when it happens and enforces said remedies through courts of law. Same with antitrust.
Conservatives seen to think this is a zero-sum game. You have 100 percent success or you have nothing. The world does not work that way. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not bring perfect racial harmony but they have corrected a lot of injustices and prevented others. This is good enough for me to validate their passing and continued existence. We can work more on the remaining injustices.
There is allegedly someone on the web called the Cowboy Libertarian. He allegedly had a post (I only saw this via hearsay) that went along the line of "Do you remember a time when all that was needed to seal a deal was a handshake and no one used a lawyer?" Call me biased but I don't think this time ever existed, people have been using lawyers and suing each other for hundreds if not thousands of years. A someone born in 1980, I notice this a lot from conservatives who are Boomerish age or older, they seem to confuse Leave it to Beaver with reality.
I don't think the past is all bad. There was a lot of excellent and amazing art produced in the past and excellent people but I would not want to live in the 1960s even though I happen to think the French New Wave is the height of cinema and I'm tired of the megablockbusters filled with spectacle and no Aristotle today. The past was still decidely more racist, more sexist, more homophobic, more anti-Semitic, etc.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Higher Ed: Profit, Price, & Performance”
It really is.
Though my New York* self is still having a hard time adopting to Californicus Flakius even though I've lived here for four years in August.
*We aren't rude. We are direct. Direct in a way that San Franciscans usually dislike.
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I live in a gentrified part of the Western Addition or as someone I know calls the neighborhood, I live in the DMV Heights.
Neighborhoods like Stern Grove are what I like about San Francisco. You have these little villages that are in the middle of the city and no one visits them! One friend describes SF as the "incorporated villages of San Francisco"
On “A Note for the Sake of Historical Accuracy”
I never liked Heeb. My own part in the Jew v. Jew debate is to be very turned off by the practioners of "Kitschy Judaism". I define "kitschy Judaism" as basically turning 5000 years of history, culture, and philosophy into a bunch on jokes. I love Jewish humor but there is more to Judaism than Adam Sandler, Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, and the Borscht Belt.
Now that I live on the West Coast, I am told that "East Coast Reform" equals "West Coast Conservative" so things might be even more lax here. There might also be a generational gap. I notice that a lot of Jews who belong to the Millenial Generation are getting tattoos (Lena Dunham is the most obvious celeb example). A lot of them talk about "reclaiming". This strikes me as odd. How can you reclaim what was never ours to begin with? I'd rather they just say they want tattoos. I would take that argument as being more intellectually honest. Though I know my views on Jews and tattoos is not going to change the minds of anyone. If someone wants a tattoo, they are going to get one.
As for the comment section (and keep in mind that I know nothing about your politics or whether you are Jewish or not), I have a theory that Republican/Politically Conservative Jews have a feeling of being an embittered minority within a minority. It seems like every Presidential election brings about the same posts about whether Jews will stop voting Democratic this year. Every Presidential election reveals the answer to be no. If you are among the 20 percent of Jews who are partisan Republicans, this must be really frustrating. Also Orthodox Jews are becoming more common. I grew up in a very Jewish suburb. When I was around, the town was largely Reform/secular, now the town is much more Orthodox.
On “Higher Ed: Profit, Price, & Performance”
Kazzy,
I grew up in Nassau County on Long Island. Now I live in San Francisco.
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Kazzy,
I suppose I would have done stuff differently as well but I can't say what my record would look like if I was a high school senior in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2012, etc. Based on what my 1998 record was (read: all over the map), I can only guess that I would not get into my alma mater if applying today. There are too many perfect candidates. You never can completely tell but even back in 1998, I was a lucky long-shot who got in.
I applied to a lot of colleges because of my all over the map grades, good extracurriculurs, and SAT scores. This turned me into the waitlist king.
So yes, it is all part of the arms race and I went to a very academically competitive high school (professional suburbs of New York). It is probably even more arms race now.
On “A Note for the Sake of Historical Accuracy”
Oh Tablet.
Normally, they are a very good on-line Jewish magazine* especially for non neo-cons like myself (and most Jews) but every now and then they have to publish an article like this and I sigh along with the neocons.
*Though I do get angry at the anti-Reform Judaism sentiment that often gets expressed in the comments. Says the proud Reform Jew.
On “Higher Ed: Profit, Price, & Performance”
Another problem is that college applications are a lot more competitive now.
I was admitted to a Tier I private liberal arts college in 1998 and graduated in 2002. I doubt that my high school record would get me admitted now. Most likely I'd be somewhere in the Tier 2 range. A lot of my cohort feel the same way.
Also it is impossible to determine what a marketable major is or is not. A person can major in comp lit, suffer for a few years, get an entry level advertising gig, and then really start to bloom, etc. Also I imagine many teachers come from Tier 2 schools. Should teachers study the subjects they teach?
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I think this is a large part of our current educational-debt-employment problem, the fact that employers do not want to train anyone for anything.
I am all for having a mass educated class. However, I think it is a problem when employers use college graduation as a short hand for competence. I've certainly had jobs that said "BA required" but could have been done by a non-college graduate.
A return to apprenticeship for a lot of jobs including many business jobs like marketing and accounting would be a good thing. I don't see this happening though.
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You can major in anything and go to law school. No extra courses necessary!
As opposed to my friends who decided to go into social work, therapy (psychological and phyiscal), etc. They needed to make up a lot of courses before grad school.
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Also, my undergrad was Division III, so there were no athletic scholarships offered.
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From what I remember, the hard part about Japanese universities is getting. Once you are admitted to the top universities, it is supposed to be smooth sailing and the old boys' network guarantees your career. This obviously happens a bit or a lot in the United States as well especially among certain schools known for creating fiercly devoted alumni but it might be more accute in Asia).
I would agree with your statement on the US system encouraging more work but that could also be part of the problem especially with the whole costs and student debt crisis. In many (or most) other countries, law and medicine are studied as undergrad subjects. This means that a person has more time in the field as a practioner to earn their income and less debt. They don't have undergrad debt plus law school or med school or business school debt piled on top.
There are some benefits to allowing law school to be a bit like grad school. I was allowed to kick around in art for most of my 20s and then head to law school when I realized my theatre career was probably not going to bloom. But in terms of debt and getting a late start into careers, it is not so good.
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Okay, this is a hobby horse of mine.
There are a lot more people who make their livings paying piano than one dozen. People still enjoy going to concerts and a dozen concert pianists could not fill the need for all the live performances.
As a former theatre person, I can also tell you that the vast majority of my artisitc friends understand the career prospects. Don't get me wrong, we all think or thought it would be very nice to make a living doing our art but I don't think most of us expected to. People create art or write or perform because they need to, it is in their blood.
The point and purpose of university is to create a well-educated person. There is such a thing as stuyding a subject out of love and passion, not for cost-benefit analysis on post-graduation employment prospects. The world does not need to be filled with STEM people only.
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My comment below was meant to be a reply to you.
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How do we outpace our foreign counterparts? Keep in mind that I was a arts and humanities student at a small, liberal arts college, not a large research university. We had science majors but no engineers, no business faculty (unless you count economics), etc. Also no graduate students. The school is a name recognized and considered elite (both in terms of being associated with the old WASP aristocracy and now for toughness in admission.academic). However, it is not a research university. Professors are largely at the school to teach. All of my classes were 15-30 students. Sometimes less. Basically, I am far away from the world of research and engineers.
Most foreign countries do not have the sheer number of universities that the U.S. does. I am not even sure what our closest competitor does. Latin American countries seem to go for universities that make Ohio State look tiny. Some Mexican universities have hundreds of thousands of students. I'd venture to say that it is hard to produce real learning in those environments.
I am not sure how ranking works in most foreign countries. I know that every country has their elite universities. Canada has McGill and Toronto, The UK has OxBridge, Japan has Tokyo, Waseda, Keio, and Osaka. But I don't know how the rest of their universities rank. The U.S. seems more clear in terms of Ivy, Comparable to Ivy (Stanford, Notre Dame, Chicago, MIT, CalTech) Small Liberal Arts elite (Wesleyan, Amherst, Oberlin, Kenyon, Grinnel, etc), Public Ivies (the UCs especially Cal, Michigan-Ann Arbor), and so on. The U.S. probably has more elite colleges and universities than some nations have universities.
Though now people are talking about whether the Ivys or comparable schools are worth it because of the cost. A lot of people say go to community college and then a state school close to home if you can to save on expense. My general reaction is contrarian to this. I think if someone gets into a Harvard, an MIT, an Emory or Duke, a Colby, etc., they should go. Those schools do offer excellent educations and yes the name matters on a resume for better or for worse.
Though everyone likes to point out the manager they know who only hires kids from big public schools because "those kids worked their way through college" while a private school grad had "mommy and daddy pay for school".
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Interesting.
Completely tangental but my non-American friends think that our educational system is complete madness. As far as I can tell, private university education is a rarity in many countries outside the U.S. or often considered inferior. The exceptions I can think of being Japan (Waseda, Keio) and France (the grandes ecoles).
I wonder whether Canada or the United Kingdom even have private universities.
One of my European friends thought that schools like Harvard and my undergrad (smal, liberal arts college in the Northeast) were for-profit because they were private. I blew his mind a bit by saying they were private and had large endowments but were still officially non-profit/501(c)(3) institutions. He seemed to think that Harvard and Yale were for-profit in the same way that the University of Phoenix is for-profit.
On “Is It Okay to Ogle Hotties, Male and Female?”
I know of couples who stay married for these reasons and also maintaining a lifestyle.
We had a family friend who used to be a local broker for a branch of one of the big investment companies. This was in an upper-middle class professional suburb. He used to say that lots of couples would come in after their kids left the nest and say they wanted to split up and asked him to do the math about lifestyle and splitting assets. His response was to many of the couples is that divorcing would probably lead to needing to step down in their lifestyle/comfort level.
So not quite the same as getting married* but somewhat close.
*That being said, I have a morbid fascination with the wedding announcements in the New York Times. They always read like a mingling of the SAT scores, Rhodes Scholarships, Fullbright Fellowships, etc. I often wonder if the first date read more like a job interview.
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I did not know that Kenneth Baranagh and Helena Bonham Carter were ever an item.
I also never made it to Order of the Pheonix movie. I've read all the books but have a bit of a dissenting view on Harry Potter. I can see why they are good and successful but am a bit perplexed by the mega-success that they have received. They are still much better than the other books that are mega-successful that perplex me Hunger Games (not as original as everyone claims), Twlight (nuff said), and 50 Shades of Grey (even more nuff said).
Part of this could be an occupational hazard from my grad school days (Theatre directing with a lot of classes on dramatic literature thrown in. My undergrad course load was also heavily literature and theatre history based), I tend towards work and more active reading than escapism and tend to get annoyed at things that most people seem to not notice or ignore. My musician friends have made similar comments about concerts. In terms of the classic C.S. Lewis essay an Experiment in Criticism, I am firmly in what he calls a literary reader.)
Harry Potter was cute enough but I got quickly annoyed at the repeated jokes about musicians not being able to dress normally. The whole "What house are you in?" aspect of the fandom perplexes me as well especially people who claim to be all about House Slytherin. I always want to state to House Slytherin fanatics, "You realize that they are a barely disguised analogy for the Nazis, right? And J.K. Rowling is basically telling kids that Nazism and caring about blood purity are very bad things." I imagine this will not go over well.
That being said, the movies are not bad. They were well cast and I'm impressed that they picked kids who really were able to grow into their roles and were generally good to great actors.
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Well there was also Much Ado About Nothing.
What was the time frame between Dead Again and their divorce?
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Dead Again is not a zombie movie. It is a crazy sorta film noir, reincarnation romantic melodrama.
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I would possibly disagree on the respectable part though I think that it is more universal than related to men.
There seem to be signs of this changing with books and articles coming out on what it means to be single and the joys of living alone/going solo. However, we still feel incredibly odd about people who don't marry unless they look like George Clooney. Look at all the needless speculation about Elena Kagan when she was in the nominee process for the Supreme Court about her unmarried status. I also find that most of the articles are focused on the one percent or close to. One recent article in the Atlantic was called "All the Single Ladies" and the author wrote about how she was borrowing a house from another single lady friend to write the article and why marry if that was her life. How many people can borrow a house in the Hamptons? I suspect being single feels a lot worse if you were 35-38 and living in a tiny studio and temping.
I'm 31, male, and unmarried and feeling weird. Most of my friends (male and female) are married, have kids, are expecting kids, own property, etc and are very much tied down. To be fair, most of them did not spend most of their 20s trying for a career in theatre but went straight to grad school or the corporate world. Part of me feels very far behind and I like I am now just doing stuff that all my friends got out of their systems at 24. The current economic situation does not help much either.
Even though I come from the socio-economic-geographic background where it is perfectly acceptable to get married in your late 30s for the first time, I still think people view me as odd for living alone at 31. And I'm in San Francisco! I have a friend who is slightly older but lives in Vermont. He says that people there view him as downright freakish for not being married at his age.
The problem is possibly because we don't know how to phrase or talk about being single without seeing it as meaning "actively searching for a relationship". There have been times in the past few years when I have done very active dating and times when school and work demands were just too much for me to do anything social.
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I also enjoy Emma Thompson. If anything, she introduced Stephen Fry to Hugh Laurie.
Though my favorite Emma Thompson movie is Dead Again. This is possibly the only movie in the "so bad, it's good" camp that I have ever really enjoyed. It helps that the plot is completely insane but everyone goes at it with gusto and the cast is A plus: Emma Thompson, Kenneth Brangnah, Derek Jacobi, Robin Williams (as a defrocked psychologist now working the graveyard shift at a meat locker), and Matt Dillon.
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And I originally thought that was a picture of Njinsky until reading further down.
I don't know if there is a clear answer here except that this is one of the many areas that shows the contradictions and hypocrisies of the human condition. The previous sentence was probably a bit too grand.
I know a lot of women who dislike Zooey Deschanel. They seem to dislike her for being too girly and being the current crush d'jour for many men or at least a certain kind of young man. Yet these same women have huge crushes on Ryan Gosling or post pictures on facebook of Ewan MacGregor in nothing but a kilt*.
Yet I have never heard a woman question me for my crush on Maggie Gyllenhaal. And I have a very big crush on her. Most women seem to find my crush on Maggie to be a sign of good taste. I'm guessing that this is because Maggie is seen as a serious actor and very intelligent**. However, as far as I can tell, Maggie Gyllenhaal has done more publicity shots in sexy underwear than Zooey Deschanel. Mary-Louise Parker is another very attractive women in the free from complaint category and I am guessing for similar reasons.
In the end, there is probably no rhyme or reason to this and looking at someone for being aesthetically pleasing is part of our biological programming. I would say that the vast majority of people do oogle someone at one point or another and feel jealousy when someone else gets oogled because it makes them feel undesirable.
*I have never been able to understand why kilts are supposed to be attractive. Perhaps this is because my ancestry is about as far from manly Celt as humanly possible. I come from firm Litvak stock with genetic dispositions towards being short. I would feel damn silly and self-conscious wearing a kilt even if Maggie herself told me to.
**I don't know whether Zooey Deschanel is intelligent or not but she does not seem to be perceived as such in the media. Maggie Gyllenhaal seems to have a reputation for being an independent minded actor who takes roles for usually non-monetary reasons.
On “Polarization and Persuasion”
One of my favorite Con Law quotes comes from Chief Justice Warren Burger (or his clerks). The quote is "The Constitution can not change social prejudice but neither can it accept it."
The case involved a mother who lost custody of her child after moving in with her black boyfriend in late 1970s or early 1980s.
This is largely my view. I don't think it is possible to create laws that say "Don't be racist", "Don't be anti-Semitic", "Don't be homophobic". What is possible is creating laws that do not allow bigots and racists to act on their prejudiced tendicies and these laws are required by the 14th Amendment in my opinion and based on my observations, they seem to work more often than not. There will probably never be a world that is bigot or prejudice free sadly but the we do seem to be rapidbly decreasing it. The Gay Rights movement made legislative gains in a much shorter time period than the civil rights movement. They still have far to go.
I have a very expansive view of free speech and do believe that people have the right to express their views no matter how horrible. I basically like the idea of the First Amendment working as a "Please feel free to shoot yourself in the foot" act. I disagree with my European and Canadian friends on hate speech clauses enough that they do look at me as a weirdo American*
As a Jewish-American, I can tell you that I grew up in a much less anti-Semitic United States than my grandparents and possibly my parents. My grandfather got into Columbia because his last name began with B and this saved him from the quota system. I did not have to worry that my last name ever prevented me from getting in anywhere. Nor have I ever seen a sign on a public pool or other facility that said something like "No Blacks. No Jews" and these signs were not too uncommon as little as 50-60 years ago.
The South was bad on civil rights. In my opinion, they are still very bad and are the creators of my view that State's Rights is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Some places in the South choose to close down their public schools instead of desegregating. I don't see how a democratic society can function and allow such recalitrance. As far as I can tell, the South will probably need dragging on gay marriage as well.
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Are we better off with gun-fights in the street?
I don't really care what is in LBJ's heart or not though I am slogging through the 4th volume of the Caro biography. He was far from a saint but I don't really care about sainthood. He did give us some damn good legislation.
The road to justice is long, slow, painful, and possibly an impossible human endevour. That doesn't mean we should not try. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better"-Samuel Beckett.
Arbitration is good when done between parties with equal bargaining power. It is not good when done between parties with uneven bargaining power like the employee-employeer relationship or in the most recent Supreme Court case between A Telecommunications Corporation and a customer. It is generally the right-wing of the court that votes to expand the scope of binding arbitration.
There are always going to be cases like you described. They happened before I was born and will sadly happen after I die most likely. There are also plenty of cases when justice is done right and injured parties to get redress for their wrongs whether for injury, domestic violence (an injunction), employment discrimination, a violation of property-rights (easements). Most cases are not easy. There are plenty of cases where someone could have a colorable claim for say age discrimination but the defendant-employer could also have a colorable reason for terminating the employment of the plaintiff. How do we decide the hard cases is a tricky issue of jurisprudence but it is one I think society is better and less violent for leaving to the courts?
If you honestly believe what you said above, I have no idea about how to find a middle ground with you. You are not presenting a picture of anyworld that I want to live in and are being plain silly with your Canadian example.
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What do we mean by work?
I don't think that my liberal policies will result in a perfect utopia where no one misbehaves whether intentionally or negligently. Human nature is not perfect and we all have our contradictions and faults. However, I think my policies will provide redress when injury occurs.
This is sort of a philosophical exercise for me as a lawyer. I can't go into full details because of confidentiality rules and ethics but I see a lot of e-mails by very smart people who should know better, they are basically breaking the law and do not care. I've seen it in product liability cases, antitrust cases involving the few clear violations like Horizontal Price Fixing and Territorial Divisions, Employment Discrimination cases, etc.
The perfect would be a society where these things do not happen but this perfect world does not exist. The good is having laws that say employment discrimination is illegal and provides a remedy for when it happens and enforces said remedies through courts of law. Same with antitrust.
Conservatives seen to think this is a zero-sum game. You have 100 percent success or you have nothing. The world does not work that way. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not bring perfect racial harmony but they have corrected a lot of injustices and prevented others. This is good enough for me to validate their passing and continued existence. We can work more on the remaining injustices.
There is allegedly someone on the web called the Cowboy Libertarian. He allegedly had a post (I only saw this via hearsay) that went along the line of "Do you remember a time when all that was needed to seal a deal was a handshake and no one used a lawyer?" Call me biased but I don't think this time ever existed, people have been using lawyers and suing each other for hundreds if not thousands of years. A someone born in 1980, I notice this a lot from conservatives who are Boomerish age or older, they seem to confuse Leave it to Beaver with reality.
I don't think the past is all bad. There was a lot of excellent and amazing art produced in the past and excellent people but I would not want to live in the 1960s even though I happen to think the French New Wave is the height of cinema and I'm tired of the megablockbusters filled with spectacle and no Aristotle today. The past was still decidely more racist, more sexist, more homophobic, more anti-Semitic, etc.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.