blake johnson

The nytimes has a very nice article on Justice Kennedy today. Reading this reminded me that I never found time to take “the Warren Court” at Harvard. Oh well. I have a feeling that the Supreme Court will be in the news a lot in the coming weeks.

In other news, the new team name seems to be working— we actually won a game last week!

I found yet another article responding to Summer’s remarks: The New Republic Online: Body of Evidence. I really liked the concluding paragraph:

Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know. As yet another of Curie’s biographers suggested, “She had survived because she had made men believe that they were not just dealing with an equal, but with an insensitive equal.” Summers knows that the age of such painful self-denial is gone, and good riddance. Still, the academy is the academy; it is not a community center. Students ought to know more than they do, and it is on Summers’s agenda that they will. No American university has yet truly grasped how the revelations of science touch on history and art, philosophy and poetry, and it is on Summers’s agenda that at least Harvard will try. In all this, he imperils the unexamined orthodoxies of the ensconced. And now, his enemies see a chance to counterattack. Let’s hope they fail and he succeeds.

There are two opinion pieces in the times today regarding Lawrence Summers’ remarks on women and science: Op-Ed Contributor: Sex Ed at Harvard and Different but (Probably) Equal. I am glad to see that both articles stress the importance and ground breaking nature of current studies into the innate differences between men and women.

A friend pointed out an excellent feature article The “Without a Doubt” by Ron Suskind in the Sunday’s NYTimes magazine about the way in which President Bush’s administration has been shaped by George W.’s faith. There is a section of the article which I find particularly disturbing:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Maybe the postmodernists out there feel right at home in this philosophy, but it makes me rather uncomfortable.

My friend Ben just made a really good comment to me over AIM:

well, Bush’s rhetoric is divorced from reality—both the reality of his policies and the reality on the ground. He is trying to be Reagan, but that is not what we need now. The Cold War was a rhetorical war, Reagan was a good president in that context. Now we have a lot of little messes and one big threat: Islamic Militant Fundamentalism. That threat and the little messes need to be dealt with with great care, diplomacy, and thought, which are not what Bush is good at. “Freedom” is not a message that works against an essentially national, post-colonial revolt in the Islamic world. they don’t hate our freedom, they don’t give a shit about our freedom, they just hate us because they feel we have been keeping them down for the last fifty years.