April 2012

Bully

April 18, 2012

The Weinstein Brothers are champions at using controversy to garner publicity for their films. Recently they used that skill to the hilt to stir up public interest in their documentary “Bully,” an intimate look at the problem of bullying in public schools. First they inserted enough explicit language to earn an R rating. Then they [...]

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If It Can’t Be Counted, Does It Count?

April 16, 2012

The aftermath of Hilary Rosen’s statement that Ann Romney “hasn’t worked a day in her life” has focused mainly on whether or not “mothering” is considered “work.” The Obama administration has fallen all over itself in an attempt to gain distance from Rosen’s statement, and Rosen herself has issued an apology. In fact, it would [...]

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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

April 9, 2012

At the beginning of the First World War, Robert Frost wrote in Mending Wall (1914), “Good fences make good neighbors” — suggesting metaphorically that borders and boundaries help to prevent war and aggression. But in that same poem he acknowledged, Something there is that doesn’t like a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And [...]

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