Tuesday, December 15, 1998

Stop the Presses! Dartmouth Racist... The 'Ghetto Party' and the National Media

These accounts, without exception, have presented highly subjective treatments of the party and the subsequent protests, treatments which not only lend moral sanction to the protests but which dismiss any criticism of the final, anti-free speech tenor the protests took.

Bill Maher: Politically Inept

ABC Newtork has a treat for all those viewers who cringe whenever Academy Award recipients use their acceptance speech to sound off on the important matters of the day. Every weekday evening, following Nightline, we get a full half-hour of political discussion from the Hollywood glitterati, hosted by comedian Bill Maher, whose film credits include Ratboy and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.

The Banning of the Indian

I judge the 1974 decision to attempt to abolish the Indian symbol to have been a moral, intellectual, and above all, because we are talking about an educational institution, an educational disaster.

The Crusade, Halted

The Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), a Christian evangelical group, sent CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, a popular theological text, to all freshman as a Christmas present. The mailing drew an enthusiastic response (over 100 '01s thanked the Crusade for the gift) and CCC planned to repeat the gesture this year.

Columbia: No Places Left at the Table

A student group, which brought some notable conservative speakers to Columbia for a conference on, of all things, the suppression of conservative speech on College campuses, was met with violent student protest. The Columbia Administration responded by shutting down the conference. The message was clear: dissenting opinions are unwelcome at Columbia.

Milton Friedman's Song Of Myself: Christopher Pearson Reviews 'Two Lucky People'

Even before he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, Milton Friedman's professional achievements ranked him with the century's most influential economists and distinguished him as the intellectual progenitor of laissez-faire economics as an academic discipline.

Pugilism and its Discontents: Benjamin Wallace-Wells Reviews 'King of the World'

The current champions are acquainted with spunk in the same sort of way Don King is acquainted with restraint: as a suspicious relic from boxing's past, like Swedish heavyweights, or the mob. Evander Holyfield's dry gospels grate with repetition, Ocsar de la Hoya seems to have adopted the Nancy Kerrigan model of toothy American wholesomeness (he seems, most of the time, out solely to convince the world just how much he loves his Wheaties), and Roy Jones Jr. has spent five years trying to figure out whether he should grimace or grin.