The game before the game

So one of my favorite things about the Super Bowl is how all the hype, long layoff before the game, and thousands of media members seems to bring out the craziness in players. (Or maybe the nuttiness is always there, but now there's someone around to record it).

The result is always some of the funniest and oddest quotes, this side of a joint Shaq-Rasheed press conference. Here are some actual quotes from actual players, all via ESPN's Chuck Klosterman's blog:

Florida really is its own universe
"People are expected to do X-Y-Z things, but I don't do X-Y-Z things. I'm Darrell Jackson, you know? I went to Florida. Nothing was ever given to me. I'm D-Jack."
-Seahawks wide receiver Darrell Jackson

That'd be a pretty quiet crowd
"Matt Hasselbeck spent much of his time on the podium talking about God; he said the Seahawks have numerous hard-core Christians on the squad, and that provides a unique sense of unity. "There is scripture that says, 'In your weakness, you see God's strength,'" said the balding quarterback. "A lot of us are united through this. I remember playing with Trent Dilfer, and -- before a big game -- he would say, 'Tonight, let's play for an audience of one.' We always try to remember that.""

Names you never thought you'd see linked

It is probably a cheap (and unoriginal) shot to ridicule journalists for asking idiotic questions, but I still find myself obsessed with the media's desire to understand what playing pro football feels like. A few minutes ago, Jerome Bettis was asked this question: "OK, Bus -- let's say the clock is ticking down and the Steelers are ahead. You are about to win the Super Bowl. Tears are running down your face, and the game is almost over. What is going through your mind?" Now, how is this a reasonable query? I'm mean, it's not that easy to describe how you feel when you're actually experiencing life in the present tense; how is Bettis supposed to describe the emotive sensation of a futuristic alternative reality? Does this guy think Bettis is Philip K. Dick? And how does he know Jerome is necessarily going to start weeping (and -- if he does -- wouldn't that suggest Jerome's mental state will be completely self-evident)?

In 1994, David Foster Wallace wrote an amusing essay about how reading Tracy Austin's co-written autobiography deeply disappointed him, partially because Austin was prone to expressing sentiments such as, "I had just won the U.S Open. It felt great." Obviously, we don't really need to read books to learn such things. But there continues to be this unkillable belief that the role of sports journalism is to help us understand how it feels to live an extraordinary athletic life, since that kind of life is beyond the average human's physical (or mental) comprehension. The problem, of course, is that this is an impossible quest, and not just because it's difficult to quantify any visceral experience; it's impossible because everyone perceives their own experiences as normative. For Jerome Bettis, winning a Super Bowl would probably feel less alien than having to operate a forklift for eight hours, which is probably why this was his response to the reporter's question: "Mission accomplished."

Klosterman's pretty funny; here's a section he wrote on football players, and 'disrespect' (when you go on about how an opponent doesn't respect you, aren't you showering him with respect, by showing how much you care about his opinion toward you?):

We play this game for respect," Seahawks rookie LB Lofa Tatupu unknowingly responded two hours later. "And to win."

The order of these priorities does not seem uncommon. As far as I can tell, there is not one player on either of these teams (or in the totality of the NFL) who has received the correct amount of respect. Sometimes guys are underrated, and sometimes guys are overlooked -- but nobody has ever been respected accurately.

I keep hoping somebody like Antwaan Randle El will blow everybody's mind and say something along the lines of, "Well, we've had our ups and downs this season, but I sense that the rest of the league respects us an average amount. I feel comfortable with the level of our public esteem." Sadly, this never happens.

Earlier this week, someone told Jerome Bettis that certain Seattle players questioned whether he was truly 255 pounds. Bettis said, "They don't believe we are a good football team, either." Now, does Bettis truly perceive this as reality? I can't believe that he does. And I realize the conventional wisdom is that jocks use disrespect as motivation, but that can't be true, either; real people simply aren't stupid enough to trick themselves into insecurity every single week for five consecutive months.

I suspect athletes complain about disrespect for the same reason bank tellers tell you to have a nice day: It just kills time and sounds normal, mostly because no one is ever listening.

This guy's good; he mixes sports and reality well. I've always contended people who don't care about sports should nevertheless read the sports page, as a microcasm of the rest of the paper. Here's more Klosterman:

Something that's becoming clear (and perhaps predictably so) is the ferocity with which the NFL aspires to promote the concept of the Super Bowl, a goal that requires everyone involved (including you) to embrace a specific philosophical contradiction: On one hand, we are supposed to view Sunday's game as the most significant conflict since the Tet offensive, because only a game of that magnitude could warrant such an ostentatious display of hyper-accelerated Americanism; at the same time, we are forced to concede that the game itself is fundamentally meaningless, since nothing this mammoth and transcendent could possibly hinge on something as trivial as Hines Ward's proficiency at running the corner post. It's the kind of circular logic that drives the Patriot Act: This singular game is so important that it's (obviously) more important than any single game.

Here's (sort of) an example: There is a lot of Super Bowl merchandise available in this Renaissance Center, and throughout the city as a whole. This, obviously, is neither surprising nor problematic. But here's what always baffles me: Why would anyone buy a T-shirt (or a hat, or an ascot, or a waterproof matador cape) that merely promotes "Super Bowl XL"? An inordinate percentage of the available items in the Renaissance Center's gift kiosks do not feature the logos of the Seahawks or the Steelers; they generically advertise the abstract existence of a football game. This would be like going to see Marilyn Manson at Madison Square Garden and buying a $22 T-shirt that said, "THEATRICAL, DRUG-FUELED ROCK CONCERT." It reminds me of the nonspecific commercials TV networks like NBC run that promote the channel itself, almost as if they assume there are actually people who privately think, "I have no idea what's on television right now, but I better check NBC first. I get the impression they're especially confident about the quality of their current programming."

Some of Klosterman's favorite quotes

(1) Troy Polamalu: "I do not have a split personality."

(2) Ike Taylor: "There will be a tomorrow." (Excellent!)

(3) Hines Ward: "Winning the Super Bowl would help me get solidified."

(4) Hines Ward again: "After losing Plaxico Burress, we proved a lot of naysayers wrong." (Take that, naysayers!)

(5) Ben Roethlisberger: Looking very My Morning Jacket-ed, Big Ben mentioned that we are fighting a war in Iraq. As soon as he said this, about 25 guys wrote it down. Roethlisberger also stated that Sunday's Super Bowl would be much bigger than any game he played at Miami of Ohio; about 30 guys wrote that down.

(6) James Farrior: "Go talk to Jerry Porter."

(7) Joey Porter: "The 3-4 is more complicated for opponents than the 4-3, because the 3-4 makes it harder to count the number of guys in the box. In the 4-3, you know there are four down linemen." (True.)

(8) Willie Parker: "Every day of your life, you need to do something to your body. You need to sit in a cold tub of water, or whatever."

My second favorite quote
"The nature of a man who has a competitive spirit will be to inevitably live a life which involves that man overcoming obstacles. But the sport of football is too physically and emotionally difficult to play simply for money or success. Personally, I have been inspired by God."
-Steelers Strong Safety Troy Polamalu

Why the NFL should expand to Jerusalem
"Football is the best way to heal any situation"
-Steelers Linebacker Joey Porter

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, Seattle Seahawks' Floyd Womack laughs at a news conference.

Gladwell's words problem

I think you have to be very careful when you start an article about racial profiling by talking about dogs.

Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, The Problem With Profiling

One afternoon last February, Guy Clairoux picked up his two-and-a half-year-old son, Jayden, from day care and walked him back to their house in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario. They were almost home. Jayden was straggling behind, and, as his father’s back was turned, a pit bull jumped over a back-yard fence and lunged at Jayden. “The dog had his head in its mouth and started to do this shake,” Clairoux’s wife, JoAnn Hartley, said later. As she watched in horror, two more pit bulls jumped over the fence, joining in the assault. She and Clairoux came running, and he punched the first of the dogs in the head, until it dropped Jayden, and then he threw the boy toward his mother. Hartley fell on her son, protecting him with her body. “JoAnn!” Clairoux cried out, as all three dogs descended on his wife. “Cover your neck, cover your neck.” A neighbor, sitting by her window, screamed for help. Her partner and a friend, Mario Gauthier, ran outside. A neighborhood boy grabbed his hockey stick and threw it to Gauthier. He began hitting one of the dogs over the head, until the stick broke. “They wouldn’t stop,” Gauthier said. “As soon as you’d stop, they’d attack again. I’ve never seen a dog go so crazy. They were like Tasmanian devils.” The police came. The dogs were pulled away, and the Clairouxes and one of the rescuers were taken to the hospital. Five days later, the Ontario legislature banned the ownership of pit bulls. “Just as we wouldn’t let a great white shark in a swimming pool,” the province’s attorney general, Michael Bryant, had said, “maybe we shouldn’t have these animals on the civilized streets.”

No cookies for you!

Protests Over Muhammad Cartoon Grow

The Associated Press: The controversy over Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad escalated Monday as gunmen seized an EU office in Gaza and Muslims appealed for a trade boycott of Danish products. Denmark called for its citizens in the Middle East to exercise vigilance.

Denmark-based Arla Foods, which has been the target of a widespread boycott in the Middle East, reported that two of its employees in Saudi Arabia were beaten by angry customers. Aid groups, meanwhile, pulled workers out of Gaza, citing the threat of hostilities. ...

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen briefed European Union colleagues about the matter Monday. He has repeatedly rejected calls to intervene.

But Arla Food's executive director urged the Danish government to take action.

"Freedom of expression is an internal Danish issue but this has a totally different dimension," Peder Tuborgh said. "This is about Denmark having offended millions of Muslims." ...

Arabs and Muslims also are calling for a boycott of Danish foods, including popular cream cheese, butter and cookie brands. Arla said the boycott of its products in the Middle East was almost total.

"Sales have come to a standstill in almost all markets," said Jens Refslund, the foods production division manager.

Arla Foods has $430 million in annual sales in the Middle East and about 1,000 employees in the region.

If you've ever been to the Mideast, you'll realize how upset people must be to give up their Danish cookies.

It's amazing that the boycott--of which I've heard nothing, outside of this article--has been so effective. Even if it is totally misguided--surely the traditional Islamic prohibition on idolatory doesn't apply to non-Muslims in non-Muslim countries; else Anheuser Busch should watch out.

It's interesting how Arab nations seem to view the boycott as one of their favorite weapons--their boycott of Israel has been going on for over 60 years. Probably something to do with their still-centralized economies, which makes a boycott easier to call.

It's a tricky situation for the Danes... maybe they should try to compensate by opening a new market in China. Now if each Chinese bought just 1 cookie....

Photo of Arla's corporate symbol by Jacken via Jacken's Blog.

Update: The Times published an article on February 2 about the cartoons with this information: An international dispute over European newspaper cartoons deemed blasphemous by some Muslims gained momentum on Thursday when gunmen threatened the European Union offices in Gaza and more European papers pointedly published the drawings as an affirmation of freedom of speech.

Vera's world

Vera Wang’s Second Honeymoon

New York magazine: In the registry department of Bloomingdale’s, 400 brides-to-be are waiting for Vera Wang. They’ve brought digital cameras and notebooks for their heroine to sign, like so many crazed teenage girls outside Justin Timberlake’s hotel. They’ve prepared questions (is it really necessary to have formal and casual china?), and they’ve dragged along their fiancés, who look, for the most part, tremendously bored.

Wang, meanwhile, has arrived, via the giant A-Team–style van she keeps in a garage beside her Park Avenue apartment. She’s in a Bloomingdale’s holding room, holding court.

“Would you like some water, Ms. Wang?” asks one of the many hovering, black-clad assistants.

“Do you have any vodka?” she answers, glancing toward the well-organized row of Poland Spring. Her voice is high and sounds almost deliberately nasal, like a put-on of an old-school garmento. “I mean, there’s got to be some vodka somewhere in this store, right?” Her publicist looks panicked. “Vodka tonic,” Wang insists, and the assistant is off.

Just in time for the start of fashion week, there's a funny profile of Vera Wang in the New York magazine--funny because it turns out she's nothing like you'd expect.

At least based on what I knew of her bridal line.

Image of the Wangs and the Clintons from Vera Wang's website.

Sell grass--make $37 billion

At Exxon Mobil, a Record Profit, but no Fanfare

The Times: Exxon Mobil, aided by strong energy prices, disclosed Monday that it had set a record for profits among American companies, reporting $36 billion in annual income. ...

Exxon Mobil's results on Monday, of course, caused jaws to drop; by some measures, the company became richer than some of the world's most pivotal oil-producing nations. Exxon Mobil reported a 27 percent surge in profit for the fourth quarter as elevated fuel prices gave rise to a full-year profit in 2005 of $36.13 billion on revenue of $371 billion. Exxon Mobil said its overall profit climbed more than 40 percent last year, while its tax bill rose only 14 percent. ...

In one measure of Exxon Mobil's wealth and influence, its revenue of $371 billion surpassed the $245 billion gross domestic product of Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most populous country, with 242 million people.

Of course, the story's not complete without:

The Associated Press: President Bush defended the huge profits of Exxon Mobil Corp. Wednesday, saying they are simply the result of the marketplace and that consumers socked with soaring energy costs should not expect price breaks. ...

Bush, a former Texas oilman, said of oil costs, "I think that basically the price is determined by the marketplace and that's the way it should be."

"I believe in a relatively quick period of time, within my lifetime, we'll be able to reduce if not end dependence on Middle Eastern oil by this new technology" of converting corn, wood, grasses and other products into ethanol, he said.

Uh... ok. Anway, let's do some comparisons. Exxon Mobil's $371 billion in operating revenue not only is larger than Indonesia's GNP, but working off a World Bank list, also that of every other country in the world, except for: the U.S., Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, China, Spain, Canada, India, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and the Netherlands.

That's right--Exxon Mobil's 'economy' is bigger than Belgium, Sweden, Turkey, Austria, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Denmark, Poland, South Africa, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Thailand, Hong Kong, Iran, Argentina, Malayasia, and Israel.

Even just Exxon Mobil's 2005 profit--$36.3 billion--is larger than the economy of every country outside the top 60; so places like Croatia, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Ecuador, Libya, Tunisia, Guatamala, and Bulgaria.

Sheesh. Maybe Exxon-Mobil should be allowed to enter the Olympics; or the UN. It looks like it's already got an ambassador.

Flag of the Netherlands via the CIA's World Factbook.

What would Captain Renault do?

Is the media institutionally racist is the title of a poll on the BBC website, attached to a story about the London police chief aplogizing for his comments that the murders of two girls got a lot of media attention in part because they're white.

These online polls are usually unscientific, but often interesting--in this case, about 63% of respondents are answering 'yes'.

You could write an entire dissertation about how the day's--or week's--big story is 'decided' upon. I do think the race and sex of story's subject, as well as that of the journalists involved, plays a role. But so too does the perceived 'buzzworthiness' of a story, in addition to factors like what actually happened, to whom, and when, whether there's good art/tape, and whether it sheds light on a broader issue, especially governmental failing.

In the end, there won't ever be an objective arbiter of how much journalistic ink or tape a story 'deserves'. Racism and bias and ignorance does play a role, but no more so--and probably less so given the open nature of most newsrooms--than any other field of human endeavor, including policing.

I don't really disagree with the chief; I just feel like there are so many seemingly non-germane and non-rational factors that influence how news stories are played that to express shock! and outrage! that the front page isn't necessarily what it 'ought' to be and to point the finger at racism is a bit futile. After all, does it make any sense that a murder that happens on Tuesday gets much more attention than one that happens on Saturday?

I'd rather spend the time and energy making sure the cops aren't institutionally racist in how they treat suspects and investigate cases, regardless of how the process is covered in the press.

Uncredited photo of London Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair from BBC website.

Skip the words

Is it the subject matter? The light? The angle? Check out more great 2005 news photos by selecting the name of the Newsday photographer from the drop-down menu. Be sure in particular to look at Moises Saman and Alejandra Villa's work.

Photos from Newsday photographers:
-Friends of a man who committed suicide wait for divers to retrieve his body, by Moses Saman

-Joann Sclafani, whose firefighter brother died fighting a blaze, by Alejandra Villa

-Aisha al-Adawiya, founder and executive director of the Woman in Islam Inc., by Viorel Florescu

-Siamese cat waits at an animal shelter to be adopted, by Julia Gaines

-Ex-NYPD officer Clayton Bullock with his son Christopher, by Robert Mecea

-Molly Klopot, 86, arrested during a grannies anti-war demonstration, by Alan Raia

-George Taborsky hits Damon Rozier during a game of quadriplegic rugby, by Audrey Tiernan

-Knicks coach Larry Brown, by J. Conrad Williams, Jr.

Rusty wires and lights in a box

It's the current fashion to bash journalists in general and the broadcast media in particular.

Without pausing, of course, to note that pretty much everything you know about the apalling state of affairs in big media you read or saw in big media.

The sins of our times--an ill-informed electorate, a vulgar culture, an apathetic body politic--are all conveniently hurled at the feet of the media, most aggressively by the very politicians and corporate interest who themselves have the most to deflect.

Blame these vague Eastern establishments, run by secret back-room cabals of cigar-smoking white men, determined to: Lie to us! Keep us in chains! Cover up the truth! Serve as big business lackeys! Drive us into war! Foment dissent and hate at home!

Far easier to tear down Dan Rather than to do the hard work and put in the time necessary to stay informed in an increasingly complex and at times scary world.

Because of course, if it weren't for big media and "their" obsessive celebrity-driven fluff coverage--tawdry stuff that nobody we know watches of course--we'd all fulfill our dreams of being Renaissance men and women.

Because that, of course, is what we all want--if not for that damn boob tube that somehow keeps growing in size in our living rooms, we could all properly buckle down and read Plato and Aristotle and Balzac and Lao Tze and above all Shakespeare, that bard from the better days, he of the high-minded plays.

Gosh, things were so much better in the good old days carved out by Edward R. Murrow and George Clooney's father--back when we all were sober, well-informed, upright citizens, a generation that won the war and then rushed home to watch all the serious documentaries and exposes that broadcasters back then offered us (so much great stuff that the only one ever cited by anyone is Harvest of Shame).

The beatings in the streets of Selma, burning of Vietnamese peasants, spying on protestors--none of that could possibly have been done by this best generation, raised on a diet of sober broadcast programming, with its cosmopolitan knowledge of the world and deep understanding of all elements of American society, all thanks to Uncle Walty's 15 minute newscast each night and Edward's every-so-often CBS news specials.

Of course Nicholas Lemann, a print journalist with no broadcast experience, writing in the pages of the New Yorker, makes sense of it all for us in The Murrow Doctorine: Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer still matter.

Commercialism and superficiality seem regnant in broadcast news. Owners avoid controversy, cut budgets, and focus on producing the profits that Wall Street demands—we’re back in the fifties. Murrow represents a kind of implacable, heroic journalistic courage that could sweep away all the obstacles in its path. ...

On network television, no news star would openly disavow Murrow’s legacy. The standard today is to have smart, competent, physically magnetic people who do straight news gravely and celebrity interviews empathetically, and who occasionally, strategically, display moral passion and then retreat, as Anderson Cooper, of CNN, did during Hurricane Katrina. Everyone suspects them of being lightweights when they first ascend, and then, when they retire, wonders if we’ll ever see their like again. If being in the Murrow mold entails occasionally editorializing on the air, and letting it be known that you aren’t getting along very well with your superiors, there are only a very few Murrow legatees—Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers come to mind, and they’ve left network television.

Back in the 50s? When were those macro problems with broadcast journalism left behind?! When was the golden age of broadcast journalism, if not now?

I doubt Lemann would agree, but I'd say broadcast news has never been more Murrow-like than in the modern era.

If nothing else, the quality of what's produced today is light-years better than it was even when Murrow was in his prime--how can it not be, when on the one hand you have Murrow and his boys on one radio network to weigh against thousands of journalists on dozens of national television and radio channels and hundreds of local stations?

Everyone today is in cutthroat competition with dozens of peers and via the Internet essentially everyone with access to a computer in the world, for viewers and listeners. And as we know from our friends the free-market disciples, if you have two markets, one where CBS Radio and Television fends off a few other giants, the other where people are fighting tooth and nail with an ever-increasing number of competitors eager to fill any news and information hole that springs up, there's precious little time or opportunity for interference from the corporate structure.

Maybe people who aren't in the industry don't understand this, but journalists are no less competitive than athletes. Last thing you do at night and first thing you do in the morning is check the scoreboard and see what stories the competition had that you missed.

Just win, baby--and the surest way to amassing ratings and dollars is still by breaking important stories first, and doing a better job of explaining what's happening in the world today.

Are all these men--and women--idiots that they can't do a better job than a dozen newsmen? Is Lemann saying his broadcast brethern are clowns, shams, fools, who go to journalism schools like his for two years and then show up for work every morning to put in a full day's worth of meaningless nonsense?

I mean, come on; Murrow was talented, and so was his team--but they weren't gods. And people beyond Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers--Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, Scott Simon, Bob Schieffer, Aaron Brown, Michele Norris, Diane Sawyer, Judy Woodruff are pretty good journalists too.

Are they so fettered by their blinkered corporate structure that these dedicated people--who have been in the business for decades and are supported by a pool of producers, researchers, writers, camerpeople, technicians, et al, and zounds of anything-you-want-anytime-you-want-it technology--can't do a better job finding out what's going on than a callow Murrow boy of 25, air-dropped into the middle of a war zone who files with bullets flying overhead?

Sheesh....

But if you don't believe in the truth-will-out journalistic process that undergirds the news business, or if you're one of those who are comfortable demeaning the integrity of an entire industry of men and women who have dedicated their lives to their craft--how about the end product?

Maybe Lemann considers the work of broadcasters today so beneath him that he doesn't watch television or listen to the radio. How else to explain:

“Harvest of Shame,” the great “CBS Reports” documentary on migrant farmworkers, which represented Murrow’s last major appearance on television, is also impossible to imagine on network television today—one hour, the day after Thanksgiving, 1960, of horrifyingly unpleasant images of poverty and hunger—and its aesthetic is straight out of the socialist-realist Depression-era work of Dorothea Lange and Pare Lorentz and Russell Lee.

Lemann later says of an interview Murrow did with Senator Joseph McCarthy:

It was great television, because it was a showdown between a journalist and a politician, but the days when a major figure on network television can pick that kind of fight, and openly state political opinions on prime time, are long gone. Today, famous broadcast journalists are far more likely to battle each other than Washington officials.

'Impossible to imagine today,' 'Long gone'--is 60 Minutes a mirage, 20/20 and Nightline and Frontline figments of our imagination? And where are these Washington officials who no longer feel battled by broadcast journalists?

The reports and footage from Ethiopia, Iraq, Bosnia, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, ANWAR--did we dream all that? Mike Wallace's interviews, Ted Koppel, Tim Russert--are these journalists not of this day and age? Are the Peabodys and Emmys and Columbia's own duPont awards given to fake stories that are broadcast in some parallel universe?

I mean, come on. There are thousands of broadcast stories airing every week on channels all across America--everything from schools to politicians to cops to large corporations are being looked at.

Not all the stories are stellar, far too many of them are fluff or entertainment-driven, a lot of them come out of the echo-chamber. But many of them are informative, and a substantial number of them are innovative and investigative--and a lot of them still give rise to change in the 'real world'.

Americans today have access to more and better journalism than we've ever had in our history. You just have to find it in the sea of programming; but it's your choice what to consume, and even if all you watch are the likes of FOX News, you'll be infinitely better informed about the world than almost any American living in Murrow's time.

And don't forget that through much of Lemann's golden age of Murrow the evening newscast was 15 minutes long, and anchors regularly pitched products before, during and after their broadcasts.

Read some of the transcripts of the newscasts sometime, it's quite astonishing how few stories were covered each night, and when they were covered, it often reads like a stenographer's notes of the government's daily press briefings.

There's very little imaginative journalism going on, and little-to-no challenging of authority; journalism then really was what some people imagine it to be today, a club of a few men sitting around deciding what the day's news was. (If you think the poor journalism of the day was limited to television, go read some of the newspaper articles from Murrow's day).

It's why Murrow had to do things like request 30 minutes of prime time to provide his sporadic special reports. There was no real news programming otherwise.

And maybe it's not a bad thing, given that the news was entirely reported by white middle-aged men.

Does Lemann seriously believe that the news business as a whole is worse today than that produced by Murrow, when women and non-whites were invisible on-air, and more importantly as producers and editors behind-the-scenes where story decisions were made?!

Lemann loses any remaining shred of credibility on this topic with the juxtaposition of two paragraphs:

By dint of trial and error, and of inspired hiring, Murrow wound up as a pioneer of virtually every variety of television journalism except evening-news anchoring: the documentary, the celebrity interview, the prosecutorial investigative piece, the on-the-scene sociological report, the expert-rich treatment of an “issue,” the gee-whiz account of one of the world’s wonders, the scary, exciting bout with danger.

Murrow’s McCarthy shows make an absurdity of the modern-day conservative accusation that, say, Dan Rather represents the introduction of a heretofore unknown ideological strain into broadcast journalism. The Murrow broadcasts were far more nakedly political than anything on network television today, and came from a source with a much bigger share of—and more adoration from—the audience than anybody has now.

Lemann first says Murrow was everything but an anchor; then he rebuts contemporary criticism of an anchor's role by using Murrow as an example?!

By confusing the two roles here and in a previous excerpt, Lemann reflects a profound lack of understanding of broadcast journalism--or at best he's just sloppy, which is ironic given his devotion to Murrow.

An evening news anchor in his role of presenting the reports of correspondents detailing the day's events has to take pains to come across as fair and balanced. That's why Dan, Peter and Tom never aired their investigative pieces on the same newscast they anchored, and that's why anchorman Rather's on-air confrontation with George H. W. Bush in 1988 stands out (incidentally, it was subsquently revealed that the Bush campaign planned the confrontation beforehand in a bid to dispel the image of Bush as a weak man).

If anchors display an ideological strain, that actually is a big deal; but it's not a standard that would be applied to the host of a news special, and so to contrast Murrow's political outspokeness with the demeanor of today's evening newscast anchors and reporters is ridiculous.

As someone who worked at the broadcast journalism trade organization that Murrow founded, and as someone who read years ago the transcript of his speech to that group that Clooney's film is built around, it's odd to read articles and criticisms like Lemann's of an industry that I actually have first-hand knowledge of.

I am by no means a Pollyanna when it comes to the state of broadcast news. The patient is nowhere near dead, but it's not exactly in the pink of health either. There are some fundamental micro issues about the medium and the way broadcast news is created on a day-to-day basis that--coupled with the macro structure of the industry, sometimes, perhaps even often times and maybe even increasingly as of late--keep the talented men and women who live and bleed journalism from sharing with the public the full benefit of their daily work.

That's a shame. Because at its best, and when these obstacles are overcome, there's no better way of understanding the world than to watch television news or listen to news on the radio. There's a melding of intellect and emotion that no other medium comes close to offering.

However, no matter the problems in the industry, it has never been better. There is no golden age of broadcast journalism, or any other type of journalism for that matter. We are it.

Even if you throw out the boom in the sheer number of people now devoted to covering the news, ignore the technological improvements that let reporters spend more time digging for stories and less time worrying about creating and transmitting them, if nothing else, this is journalism's golden age because the industry has never been as diverse as it is today. Both in terms of journalists themselves and in terms of access to story sources, so stories are less likely to be ignored or overlooked out of sheer ignorance.

It's hard to overestimate how important this is. Murrow and his boys never even had the chance to ignore or cover poorly 90% of the day's news, because they simply didn't know those stories existed. By the context of his time, he was a great journalist--if we reran his stories today, he would be seen as limited.

Today's diversity, again not just in people themselves but also in the sheer number of ideas they can access via things like the Internet, is not where it should or even could be. But it's still better than it's ever been.

And if you don't believe me, read Murrow's celebrated 1958 speech. Compare the bleak news landscape he describes to the vibrant, noisy one around us today--Murrow's life and he stood for is best exemplified by our times.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

Photo of Edward R. Murrow from the organization he started, the Radio-Television News Directors Assocation.

The cradle will rock

Chinese nanny state takes root in US

The BBC: An increasing number of families in the United States is looking to employ Chinese nannies - not so much for their child-rearing abilities, but more for their language skills.

Parents always want to give their children a good head start in life to prepare them for the future.

It seems that families in the United States with a lot of disposable income believe that helping their children master the intricacies of Mandarin at an early age is one way to do that.

Companies who place nannies or au pairs with families in New York have experienced a rush of requests for native Chinese-speakers.

That is the trend right now, according to JaNiece Rush of Lifestyle Resources.

"Just in the last couple of years, we've received an influx of calls where families are hoping that we can find them Chinese-speaking - especially Mandarin-speaking - nannies and housekeepers, so that their children will pick up Chinese," she says. ...

Rush explains that they are in such high demand they can command a salary of around $20,000 more than the average nanny would earn.

One Chinese woman even managed to secure a salary of $70,000-a-year after two families tried to outbid each other to get her

Wow--quite a ways from the days of yellow peril!

It's an interesting article--not incidentally because it's the BBC's take on America, so there's an undercurrent of anthropology to the piece.

I think the relationship between Americans and their nannies is a weird one. In a lot of cases people entrust their kids to caregivers who they see and treat as socially and racially beneath them--it's almost like they're breeding class consciousness and snobbery in their kids.

I mean, how weird is it for a 6-year-old to know there's an adult, usually darker-skinned, who exists solely to watch out for them, and do their bidding? It instills in them a sense of egoism and entitlement that probably never goes away.

It can be counterbalanced, of course, by love--when your kids spend more time with their nannies than you, and when it's the nanny who's there for everything, good and bad, it's natural for a bond to grow between them.

It may not be rooted in equality but for a lot of kids their nannies must seem more their parents, better or worse, than their biological forebearers.

I'm curious to see what happens when you have parents bringing in nannies and encouraging them to bring their kids into a world that, linguistically and culturally, the parental generation has little understanding of.

I think it's great for Americans to learn more about China, regardless of the avenue. Everyone really ought to read John Derbyshire's Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream for that reason. The guy's a jingoistic transplanted Brit of the worse sort in some ways, but he understands the Chinese, and it's an understanding of the best and worst of that country that very few Americans currently have.

From the point of view of a caucasian parent, what happens when the nanny starts raising their kids on the same stories and fables from five thousand years of China's history that schoolkids in Communist China grow up on?

How does the worldview of a kid born and raised in America alter when exposed he or she is exposed to Buddhism from the cradle?

Will future generations of Caucasian Americans have a soft spot for China, and understand better the deep-rooted Chinese fear of instability, and its twin fear of inferiority that now exposes itself as the most virulent nationalism?

A generation of the scions of America's most prominent families, influenced from a young age by inscrutable Asiatics... sounds like something only Hollywood could dream up.

Photo of Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and his mother (Angela Landsbury) from John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, via Morphizm.

Maybe he's curious too

A Whale of a Tale on The Thames

The Times: [W]hen a northern bottlenose whale measuring around 17 feet and weighing up to 7 tons was spotted today heading upstream near the London Eye Ferris Wheel, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, even the most jaded Londoners sensed they were in the presence of something unusual.

"There have been dolphins and porpoises but we've never heard of a whale here," said Carla Redmond, 21, a disc jockey on a pleasure boat moored on the river. Experts said it was the only whale-sighting in over 90 years of formal records.

Thousands left their offices to line the river to watch. TV helicopters took to the skies. Friends exchanged text message photographs of sightings. At one point, in early afternoon, the whale seemed to beach off Cheyne Walk - one of the most fashionable streets in already fashionable Chelsea - and a man waded into the Thames, flapping his hands to get the whale back into deeper water.

"It's quite surreal," said a BBC television reporter as she bobbed in one of the flotilla of small boats that formed in an attempt - unsuccessful by nightfall - to herd the whale back downstream. ...

It evoked something of the magic that comes when one species meets another at close quarters - like sitting with mountain gorillas in Rwanda or stalking lions by open Land Rover in Tanzania. And it touched something, too, in the soul of a nation with a traditional fondness for waifs and strays. ...

"I think half of London will be out there trying to rescue it," said her husband, Michael.

I liked this quote the best: "I wonder why it's here, I'm curious about it," said a man on the Golden Jubilee Bridge who identified himself only as Sean, 43, a vendor of the Big Issue, a magazine usually sold by homeless people.

The BBC story made me smile, it's so earnest.

There's indeed something magical about this story; maybe just a reminder that for all our iPods, Blackberrys and urban metropolises, at root we're we're not that far removed from life on the savannahs. And every so often one of our fellow animals slips through to remind us of that.

Photo of whale swimming by Houses of Parliament by British Divers Marine Life Rescue, distributed by AP, via BBC News.

Something sour in Pennsylvania

Candy Man: 'Hershey,' by Michael D'Antonio

The Times: [Milton Snavely] Hershey bought those German machines and had them shipped to Lancaster. In a bold move, he sold his caramel company and began laying out plans for a chocolate factory surrounded by a residential neighborhood complete with trolley system, grand public buildings and homes complete with indoor plumbing, which itself was to be surrounded with dairy farms. "There remained one problem," notes D'Antonio. "Milton Hershey did not know how to mass-produce milk chocolate."

The research team often worked 16-hour shifts, and finally the secret - using skim milk and heating the mixture slowly - was uncovered. The business took off and the town of Hershey exploded. But it was not paradise for everybody. A minority of workers, D'Antonio writes, looked at Hershey and saw not "a benevolent creator" but "an egotistical captain of industry." For example, "he was so conscious of his status that when a junior office worker made the mistake of asking him for some water, he ceremoniously filled every glass in the room and then fired the man who had said that he was thirsty."

Sensible with money at home but extravagant when he traveled, Hershey was a gambler who was devoted to a wife with a mysterious past. The couple had no children, and in 1909 he placed much of his fortune in trust to a school that he started for orphans. By 2002, the school had an estimated endowment of $5 billion - eight times as large as that of Phillips Exeter Academy, America's next wealthiest private school. When the school's board announced plans to sell its controlling interest in the company and diversify its portfolio, the townspeople united to stop the deal at the last minute, arguing that the loss of local control could threaten the economic security of the town.

Hershey's candymaking genius was hardly consistent. He spent years trying to figure out how to "mix turnips, parsley, celery and even beets into chocolate." Even his signature product had - and still has - its critics. Compared to Swiss chocolate, D'Antonio writes, Hershey's "carries a single, faintly sour note," the result of the fermentation of milk fat, a side effect of using liquid condensed milk rather than powdered milk. This edge came to "define the taste of chocolate for Americans, who would find harmony in the sweet but slightly sour flavor."

To me, the line that jumped out at me from Benjamin Cheever's review of D'Antonio's biography is the aside about the school for orphans Hershey endowed--$5 billion?! Why haven't we heard about this school before?

Everyone, after all, has heard of Exeter--but what's this school done with its tremendous resources? What superstar students has it produced--or how many lives has it made better? As Forbes notes in an article entitled Sugar Daddy:

With money made from chocolate, Milton Hershey endowed what today is the richest grade school in the world ($7.8 billion)

Who is the biggest shareholder of the $4.8 billion (estimated 2005 sales) Hershey Co., North America's largest manufacturer of chocolate? A kindergarten through 12th-grade school in Pennsylvania's rolling countryside. The Milton Hershey School holds by far the biggest pot of securities of any primary or secondary school on the planet. At $7.8 billion its endowment dwarfs that of the second-richest (the academically elite Phillips Exeter), which has less than a tenth as much. Only six U.S. universities have endowments larger than this school's.

Wow--well, so now this school should really be judged alongside Harvard, Yale, Standford, etc.?! A quick Google search of news articles, however, shows the school only pops up with regards to its sports teams, a suit filed by the company over the cover of D'Antonio's book, and an unsuccessful attempt by the school's board to secretly sell Hershey's:

Three years ago the school's unique power over the Hershey company created a furor. The board of the trust secretly hatched a plan to sell its 78% of the company's voting shares to Wrigley for $12 billion. But residents of the company town and Hershey's workers opposed the sale and got politicians behind their movement. The anti-Wrigley mob appealed to the state's attorney general, who intervened by filing a petition in Orphans' Court, a legal relic of an earlier time that rules on whether organizations entrusted with the welfare of children are performing properly. An injunction issued by Orphans' Court was enough to thwart the merger.

Ah, Orphan Court--what's going on with the school's mission to educate orphans? A little research uncovers the Milton Hershey School's website, with its odd Harper's-like index:

-Musical instruments played by MHS students: 20 different types (pianos to piccolos)
-Animals that students can enjoy and learn to care for through animal clubs: horses, beef cattle, sheep, deer, rabbits, goats
-Percentage of students who like to sing: 23% participate in one of the 6 choral groups
-Favorite dessert served at MHS: peanut butter cake
-Percentage of students with access to bicycles: 100%

Under History, you find: "MHS first concentrates on fulfilling its in loco parentis (Latin for "in place of the parent") responsibilities to the children under its care, namely its duties to safeguard, nurture, and educate the children whom we are priveleged to serve."

Apparently proof-reading isn't a priority for the school. And, it seems, the school no longer serves its original mandate of educating orphans--under Admissions Criteria, it says "To be considered for enrollment, the child must":
-Come from a family of low income.
-Be from the ages of 4-15 years old.
-Have the ability to learn.
-Be free of serious emotional and behavioral problems that disrupt life in the classroom or the home.
-Be able to take part in the MHS program.
-Be a United States citizen.

You can tell a lot about an organization from its website--the school's feels to me more frivolous and shiny than it ought, given its weighty mission.

By specifying the kids not have serious problems, it seems to me the school's turned its back on Hershey's initial intent of serving the worst-off of our society.

Something really seems odd here. There's nothing wrong with providing services to underprivileged kids--but with a $5 billion endowment, you'd really expect to have heard about the organization; besides which, what about the orphans? Why aren't they mentioned?

Some more digging turns up a 2000 report by the Milton Hershey Alumni Association:

Over the last two years, the Milton Hershey School Alumni Association ("MHSAA")2/ has devoted itself to seeking an understanding of the history of the Milton Hershey School Trust (the "Trust"), the Deed of Trust (the "Deed"), and our own history. In this endeavor, MHSAA has utilized the expertise of the tradesmen and professionals who graduated from our school and who comprise our organization. While we are in a sense a ragtag army of volunteers, we count amongst our numbers seasoned attorneys, accountants, construction and real estate experts, educators, childcare experts, and members of many other professions. Through the unselfish efforts of countless of our members, particularly those who have unique knowledge related to the matters at issue, MHSAA has reviewed warehouses full of documents, combed the public records, interviewed hundreds of keywitnesses, unearthed long-forgotten and dusty files, traced witnesses across America, and otherwise undertaken an exhaustive review of all available evidence related to the matters at issue. MHSAA believes that no other comparable research project has ever been undertaken....


What our study unearthed was shocking even beyond the worst suspicions of the most avid critics of the Board. MHSAA's study revealed that the Deed of Trust had been reconstructed by the Board over an extended period of time, along lines explicitly rejected by Mr. Hershey while he was alive. We also discovered that court petitions amending the deed had been filed in flagrant disregard of Pennsylvania law, without notice to the public or any public hearings, and which resulted in the illegal transfer of substantial assets to uses which the Trust's own counsel understood to be illegal under the terms of this Trust. Most disturbing, we discovered that Mr. Hershey would never have supported the Board's various actions, having expressly rejected each during the time that he was alive.5/ Finally, we came to believe that had the court and the Attorneys General been adequately apprised of the long-term plans of the various Boards undertaking these actions, they would not have countenanced the changes obtained by these Boards, which changes are now of concern to MHSAA.

It's a long, detailed report; the conclusion states:

MHSAA has observed for years the degeneration of the values of the school which Mr. Hershey founded and has reluctantly entered the fray in defense of those values. This process began in the early 90's, when relations between MHSAA and the Board deteriorated, because MHSAA openly opposed actions which we believed to be in violation of the Deed, and at a time when the Board was engaged in changes of school presidents and policies that made no sense whatsoever from the perspective of the interests of the school's children. Last year, when MHSAA was seeking to bridge the distance between itself and the Board through informed discussions of the Deed in historic context, the Board sought leave of the Orphans' Court to direct but another $30 to $50 million to a project premised on the absurd notion that there weren't enough dependent and at-risk children in America to adequately utilize the assets of the Trust.

MHSAA thus opposed this effort by the Board. In opposing this effort -- in the so-called CHILD cy pres petition -- MHSAA uncovered evidence of the most unconscionable acts imaginable, including flat-out misappropriation of orphan assets to build the Penn State medical school, in violation of Pennsylvania law, and in derogation of the needs of millions of American orphans. What's worse, MHSAA also uncovered a pattern of consistent abuse of discretion over time, which was coupled with a deliberate and insidious dismantling of the ideals of Mr. Hershey, through a steady duping of the local courts and the public. This process was at times abetted by the Pennsylvania authorities themselves, or countenanced by these authorities since they themselves appear to have been misled by the various Boards over time.

Early this year, MHSAA demanded that these issues be addressed, lest MHSAA be forced to seek relief from the Orphans' Court. These demands led to the appointment of Dick Thornburgh and K&L [Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP], to undertake what was represented would be an independent investigation. On the basis of this representation, MHSAA reined in its more outspoken members, tabled its plans for seeking relief directly from the court, and cooperated fully with the K&L investigation. MHSAA was confident that any independent review would demonstrate the merit of our contentions and thus aid in beginning to set aright the course of the school -- including rectifying past grossly illegal changes to the Deed. While waiting for the K&L investigation to conclude, the Board accelerated its effort to transform the school -- destroying old farmhouses, directing more land to non-school uses, and quietly changing admissions criteria to permit ever-rising income levels among newly-admitted students, while increasingly closing the door to full orphans, wards of the court, and foster care children.

Wow, quite an indictment--and coming from the school's own alumni.

Probably the most damning section of the report comes before the conclusion, in a section called Changing Demographics of the School:

Taking together all of the various acts of successive Boards, at the core of MHSAA's concerns is an effort by these Boards to slowly erode the role of the Trust as a caretaker institution for the specific group of children whom Mr. Hershey originally sought to aid -- poor, dependent and at-risk children -- in favor of a new role, as a kind of "prep school" for less affluent albeit not desperate children. While this has not been accomplished yet, it is slowly occurring, in such an insidious way that its prevention now will only be achieved with the direct intervention of such outside authorities as the Pennsylvania Governor and Attorney General.

To explain, beginning with the announcement in 1976 that the children of divorced parents would thereafter be considered "social orphans" and so meet an expanded criteria for admission to the school, there has been a steady expansion of the target class of child beneficiaries, in derogation of the needs of the most desperate of America's children. Thus, when the Board was commencing its planning of the campus "centralization" scheme and the end to vocational training in the early 1990's, the Board sent teams to observe the elite prep schools in the country, and then sought to model the school along those lines. This resulted in the introduction of a radically different view of the school, as merely the provider of an education to children somewhat better than the education available in their own neighborhoods, and with a corresponding drift away from the view of the school as a home for children who desperately need one.

Indicia of this shift include a radical decrease in the number of full orphans, wards of the court, and foster care children in the school today, with the trend accelerating every day, to a point where the trend will soon be irreversible. To illustrate this in concrete terms, the school today is apparently prevented by law from accepting even a single foster care child into its care, because the Board has not obtained the appropriate license to do so. Other indicia include rising income levels of the families of newly admitted students, such that last year, some 50% of these families were from above the poverty level, in a nation where some 30 million children live below the poverty level. This year, the Board simply declined to disclose these statistics in their annual report, even refusing written requests from graduates to provide the information -- a fact which underscores how deliberate and insidious this effort has been.

Glossing over this issue, K&L mentions that the Board -- again, in the absence of legal authority to do so -- decided last year that their new admissions criteria would simply multiply the federal poverty rate by 150%, and use that standard to determine what class of children should be admitted to the school. This is notwithstanding that there are some 500,000 children in foster care, and for which children the federal poverty guidelines are meaningless, because their income is zero.

K&L does suggest, absurdly, that the "number of orphans in America has declined" since Mr. Hershey set out to save these children, as though to provide an endorsement of the Board's continued drift away from Mr. Hershey's wishes. In this, the K&L Report's authors are either engaging in intentional misstatement, or else they have genuinely never heard of AIDS -- a disease which by itself has created an explosion in America in the number of physically healthy orphans who need a home such as that provided by the school. Similarly, K&L must also be completely unaware of all of the other facts mentioned in this Response, such as the number of children who have lost parents for a multitude of socioeconomic reasons, including the drug epidemic, the explosion in the prison population, and the failure of the American economic boom to reach the lowest strata of society.

All of these trends in the increase of orphan children are compounded by a corresponding decrease in the number of quality orphanages remaining in existence today, the latter of which results solely from the fact that quality residential care for dependent children is just so expensive that most dependent children will never have the opportunity to receive this kind of care, but will instead be consigned to such inferior alternatives as foster care and group homes.49/ In short, K&L's unsupported statement notwithstanding, the number of children whom the school can serve today under the criteria established by Mr. Hershey is at an all-time high absent any expansion of the applicant pool. Furthermore, expansion of the applicant pool in the manner sought by the Board results in closing the school to the children at the bottom of the barrel, in favor of less difficult (and less needy) children at the top.

I think it's problematic when richly-endowed institutions take on a life of their own, and go against the desires of their founder. Sure, decades down the road, times change--so make minimal changes and try to interpret the spirit rather than the letter of the original deed, like we try to do with the U.S. Constitution.

But for crying out loud, don't do anything that fails to pass the smell test. It seems to me Mr. Hershey wanted his school to do the best job it could of helping orphans. The school as constituted today doesn't do that--as the report notes, its Board seems more intent on creating a posh boarding school and expanding its social standing, than fulfilling the mandate under which it exists.

There's nothing wrong with creating a posh private school--just don't do it with money intended for orphans. If you're going to accept the money of a founder, realize it may come with strings, and abide by them.

It all reminds me of the Barnes Foundation, another Pennsylvania institution--in this case a school specifically deeded by its founder to educate art students--that's strayed pretty far afield from its mission.

In the Barnes' case, the board won its battle, and was able to blatantly disregard the will of its founder and move the school's collection of artwork from the countryside to a brand new museum in Philadelphia.

(It's odd that there isn't more of an outcry from Republicans who usually are first at the barriers on any sortof eminent domain issue, where the nebulous 'public good' is used to justify takings from individuals.)

Sure, lots more people will now be able to be 'educated' by the artwork--but that's not what Barnes wanted. He wanted a small, quiet school where students could immerse themselves in art; the works are purposefully 'displayed' crammed on the walls of the house, meant to reward long-term study, rather than cursory gallery tours.

Destroying his intention in order to try and chase after a different social good is paternalistic and insulting to his memory in the extreme. He knew what he wanted--if the current trustees think they know better, they should go endow their own multimillion dollar foundation.

Likewise, the Hershey school's board should go find their own sugar daddy if they're so unwilling to fulfill M.S. Hershey's mission of helping orphans.

Image of Amedeo Modigliani's 1918 painting The Boy, from the collection of the Barnes Foundation, via Webmuseum.

Glimmer in our eyes

In 'Design' vs. Darwinism, Darwin Wins Point in Rome

The Times: The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. "It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious. ...

Many Roman Catholic scientists have criticized intelligent design, among them the Rev. George Coyne, a Jesuit who is director of the Vatican Observatory. "Intelligent design isn't science, even though it pretends to be," he said in November, as quoted by the Italian news service ANSA. "Intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science."

In October, Cardinal Schönborn sought to clarify his own remarks, saying he meant to question not the science of evolution but what he called evolutionism, an attempt to use the theory to refute the hand of God in creation.

"I see no difficulty in joining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, but under the prerequisite that the borders of scientific theory are maintained," he said in a speech.

To Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and a Catholic, "That is my own view as well."

"As long as science does not pretend it can answer spiritual questions, it's O.K.," he said."

It's the clunkiest headline I've seen in the Times for a while, but like everything else in the paper worth reading for the content.

And worth reading as a reminder that evangelicals don't speak for a majority of Christians, especially when they seek to recast religion in self-centered terms.

I liked this concluding quote from professor Facchini: "God's project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction."

I've always found the 'intelligent' part of ID to be insulting--I think labeling God intelligent diminishes God to human terms. What is intelligent to God is quite possibly unintelligable to us.

It's not to say let's throw up our hands and be sheep. Rather, it's like looking at a far-away object. The best way to do it isn't to stare straight at it; rather, to catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of the eye.

Image from the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam via Artarchive.

Simply the best

How great is the New York Times?

They don't even have to put into stories the kind of details that 'rival' newspapers would kill for. As their public editor, Byron Calmie, notes:

One of the most important articles The Times has published in recent months was the Dec. 19 article about Webcam child pornography and a teenager who had been a part of that world since he was 13.

Kurt Eichenwald, the reporter, last year persuaded Justin Berry, then 18, to stop using drugs, to get out of the business and to tell his story to The Times on the record. Aided by Mr. Eichenwald, Mr. Berry eventually became an informant in a federal investigation that has already led to arrests. ...

Despite the close working relationship between reporter and source, The Times did not go out of its way to portray Mr. Berry favorably. While the article did note that he had returned to his church in Bakersfield, Calif., and put biblical teachings on his Web site during a period when he was 18 and 19, editors decided not to report how he used money left over from his years in the pornography business to help the homeless, according to Mr. Eichenwald.

"Justin purchased several tons of clothing [and] oranges and rented a truck," the reporter recounted in an e-mail to me. "He then began heading into homeless areas around Los Angeles every night, where he delivered clothing and oranges to the homeless."

It's hard enough trying to compete with what the Times publishes--let alone what it leaves on the cutting room floor.

Especially when what they cut is the right decision journalistically, but one which 9 out of 10 media outlets in this day of desperate race for content would lead or tease with.

Photo of Justin Berry reflected in a computer screen by Noah Berger for the New York Times.

Calling it macaroni

China beat Columbus to it, perhaps

The Economist: The brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He's case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

I read much of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, a book written in 2003 by Gavin Menzies that brought to the West's attention the possibility that China may have been first--and by centuries--to many of the 'discoveries' traditionally ascribed to Western explorers.

I didn't find the book believable--the way it was written failed to inspire confidence, instead you felt as if Menzies was simply throwing in anything that supported his preconceived conclusions.

The Economist in the body of the article mentions both Menzies's work and questions about the new map, but concludes:

The consequences of the discovery of this map could be considerable. If it does indeed prove to be the first map of the world, “the history of New World discovery will have to be rewritten,” claims Mr Menzies. How much does this matter? Showing that the world was first explored by Chinese rather than European seamen would be a major piece of historical revisionism. But there is more to history than that. It is no less interesting that the Chinese, having discovered the extent of the world, did not exploit it, politically or commercially. After all, Columbus's discovery of America led to exploitation and then development by Europeans which, 500 years later, made the United States more powerful than China had ever been.

It matters, of course, a lot. China is rising in the world; it's increasingly not easy for Europeans to take for granted their superiority in all things non-American, especially when it comes to the future. After all, nobody is accusing China today of not exploiting their opportunities on the world stage.

I wonder what happens to Europe's fragile psyche once their assumed superiority in even the past is taken away? What if our notions of 'European mastery' are built on a mix of ignorance, and prejudice?

To borrow a favorite line from the movie Spartacus, "We've already been made to look a fool, let's not add the trappings of a clown!" Will Europe's exploratory mastery go the way of its 'discovery' of the printing press--and the noodle? [Did anyone outside of Italians ever really think they were the ones to come up with pasta?!]

Perhaps showing how provincial the British really are, the Economist article includes this paragraph (egads, a world without England!):

The detail on the copy of the map is remarkable. The outlines of Africa, Europe and the Americas are instantly recognisable. It shows the Nile with two sources. The north-west passage appears to be free of ice. But the inaccuracies, also, are glaring. California is shown as an island; the British Isles do not appear at all. The distance from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is ten times greater than it ought to be. Australia is in the wrong place (though cartographers no longer doubt that Australia and New Zealand were discovered by Chinese seamen centuries before Captain Cook arrived on the scene).

1763 copy of Chinese map dated 1418 via The Economist.

Pat the jackal

Imagine if Marion Gordon 'Pat' Robertson were Muslim.

Mullah Robertson--host of a TV show watched daily by a million Muslims, founder of major Muslim organizations, sought out regularly for comment by newspapers and broadcasters, a visible and prominent pillar of the Muslim community.

What would the reaction of the country be if Mullah Robertson said Ariel Sharon's massive stroke was punishment from God?

If Mullah Robertson warned the citizens of a small town that God may forsake them and hit the with a disaster after they decided not to proselytize for Islam in public schools.

If Mullah Robertson called for the assassination of the leader of a country to our south?

I wonder if Pat thanks God ever day for being born white and Christian.

I personally don't care too much about Pat; like his peer Pat Buchanan (what's Pat Sajak like? Pat Benatar?) he serves as a canary in a mine--his open words reveal what his followers and bedfellows try to keep hidden.

But I wonder about people like Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., who called Robertson "a great friend of Israel".

Are you kidding? Robertson's a friend of Israel the same way a farmer's a friend of his slowly-fattening hog.

Pat, like many evangelicals, believes in order for the Rapture to come, Israel must be united--he sees Israel's entire existence as merely a stepping stone to what really matters... and once the Rapture comes, of course, Israelis as well as the rest of the non-evangelical world will be wiped out as God separates the wheat from the chaff and brings his chosen people home.

So I guess if you think a friend is someone who values you as a stepping stone to their eternal life, yeah, Pat Robertson is a friend of Israel (and all Americans).

Photo of Pat Robertson in Jerusalem by Brennan Linsley for the AP, via mentalblog.com.

There's an interesting Slate article, Supersede Me: Evangelicals rethink how to convert Jews that discusses Robertson, evangelicals and Jews that includes these lines:

The shift away from supersessionism is best articulated in the influential 2001 essay "Salvation Is From the Jews" (a quotation from John 4:22), by Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic priest who edits the journal First Things. Neuhaus argued that American Christians needed to relate to Jews in a new spirit not of proselytism but of mutual edification. Jews in America aren't just potential Christians, he argued. They are unique conversation partners with insights that may help Christians better understand their own faith. "The salvation that is from the Jews cannot be proclaimed or lived apart from the Jews," Neuhaus writes. And elsewhere: "[W]e can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel." In other words, the continuing existence of Jews is not a failure of evangelism.

But Neuhaus does not mean that Christians should give up on converting Jews. Evangelicals are evangelicals, after all, not Unitarians. Rather, Neuhaus writes, "[W]e can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other." ...

Most traditional evangelicals would agree with the Jewish literary critic Stanley Fish, who has argued that evangelicals are obligated, if they're intellectually honest, to proclaim frankly that theirs is the universal truth. Any hemming and hawing is just caving in to liberal sensibilities."

One day, 1/5th the size of China

The Times: Come October, Baby Will Make 300 Million or So

If the experts are right, some time this month, perhaps somewhere in the suburban South or West, a couple, most likely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Hispanic, will conceive a baby who, when born in October, will become the 300 millionth American.

As of yesterday, the Census Bureau officially pegged the resident population of the United States at closing in on 297,900,000. The bureau estimates that with a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is growing by one person every 14 seconds.

The bureau estimates that with a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is growing by one person every 14 seconds. ...

In 1967, when the population reached 200 million, Life magazine dispatched 23 photographers to locate the baby and devoted a five-page spread to its search. Instead of deciding on a statistically valid symbol of the average American newborn, the magazine chose the one born at precisely the appointed time.

Life immortalized Robert Ken Woo Jr. of Atlanta, whose parents, a computer programmer and a chemical engineer, had immigrated seven years earlier from China. Mr. Woo graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and is a litigator. Now 38, he still lives in Atlanta with his wife, Angie, who is also a lawyer, and their three daughters.

"He did feel an obligation to do well," Ms. Woo said. "But I think he would have done well, regardless."

It's interesting to me that an Asian American man in 1967 was Life's official face of the 200 millionth American.

I'm curious as to what the reaction was at the time, with America having recently fought to an armistice in Korea against Red China and in the midst of the quagmire in Vietnam.

Was the reaction from some anything like when Maya Lin was revealed as the winner of the blind Vietnam War memorial competition?

Maybe it was like the reaction of the 40% of voters in Alabama who in 2000 voted to keep the state's miscegenation laws.

The great thing about this country is it changes--and in unexpected and sometimes unpopular ways. We're not near perfect, but we struggle and argue and fight in pursuit of getting better.

People by virtue of not being in control of their community are forced to confront their racism and other prejudices, often times in reaction to judicial fiat--the civil rights movement--or increasingly in response to pop culture--gay and lesbian rights.

Which is why things like gated communities, public vouchers for private schools, and even socially-isolating iPods should be fought.

Now just imagine how great would it be if Census demographers annoit an Arab-American as the face of the 300th millionth American!

In any case, Mr. Woo seems to have done well for himself.

Photo of Robert K. Woo from King & Spalding.

Modern day fairy tale

It's very strange, but just about every film review I've ever read gets details about the movie wrong. I'm not just talking about matter of interpretation--I'm talking about easily-verifiable facts that anyone with a half-way decent memory ought to get right to begin with.

It's not even that I have such a superior memory in comparison to the Eberts of the world. Rather, I think that if you 'get' a film, it's easy to remember things about the film--there tends to be an interior logic to things, especially if the film is well-crafted. And even for bad films, things tend to be bad the same way, so wrong details in reviews still jump out.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up Roger Ebert's review of a film I just watched for the first time, The Princess Bride. Which, incidentally, I liked--it's a good mix of sweetness and silliness, with lotsof quotable lines. I don't think it's an astonishing film; perhaps if I'd seen it aged 10 I'd have been bowled over. But I doubt it; it's too self-referential and clever, actually, to really be deemed astonishing.

Anyway, Ebert's eight-paragraph review gets scads of things wrong:

""The Princess Bride" begins as a story that a grandfather is reading out of a book. But already the movie has a spin on it, because the grandfather is played by Peter Falk, and in the distinctive quality of his voice we detect a certain edge. His voice seems to contain a measure of cynicism about fairy stories, a certain awareness that there are a lot more things on heaven and Earth than have been dreamed of by the Brothers Grimm."
-I think this is wrong; the grandfather isn't cynical at all, it's his grandkid who is. The grandfather has a certain roughness to him, but it's feigned and instead conveys great affection.

"The story he tells is about Buttercup, a beautiful princess (Robin Wright) who scornfully orders around a farm boy (Cary Elwes) until the day when she realizes, thunderstruck, that she loves him. She wants to live happily ever after with him, but then evil forces intervene, and she is kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands, while he is killed."
-I don't find her tone scornful at the beginning, it's more indolent or this faux high-handedness, like she's practicing being nobleborn. He's not really a farm boy--there's really no such thing, that's just what she calls him (it'd be like saying Chewbacca is a 'fuzzball' since Han Solo refers to him that way); he's more like farm hand. She's not really thunderstruck when she discovers she loves him, it's not such a huge gap to overcome, they've constantly been around each other growing up. Her wanting to live happily ever after isn't interrupted by evil forces and she isn't kidnapped and taken far away across the lost lands--he goes away to make his fortune so they can afford to get married, she stays on the farm, then she hears he's been killed by pirates, and then she's selected to be princess and goes willingly because she thinks he's dead and has given up. After that, she's kidnapped, but the stuff in between is pretty key.

"Is this story going to have a lot of kissing in it?" Falk's grandson asks. Well, it's definitely going to have a lot of Screaming Eels.
-Well, there are two screaming eels in one one-minute scene, so that's not really a lot.

"The moment the princess is taken away by agents of the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), "The Princess Bride" reveals itself as a sly parody of sword and sorcery movies, a film that somehow manages to exist on two levels at once: While younger viewers will sit spellbound at the thrilling events on the screen, adults, I think, will be laughing a lot. In its own peculiar way, "The Princess Bride" resembles "This Is Spinal Tap," an earlier film by the same director, Rob Reiner. Both films are funny not only because they contain comedy, but because Reiner does justice to the underlying form of his story. "Spinal Tap" looked and felt like a rock documentary - and then it was funny. "The Princess Bride" looks and feels like "Legend" or any of those other quasi-heroic epic fantasies - and then it goes for the laughs."
-This is kindof true, but not particularly apt, I feel like there's too much sweetness and purposeful fantasy in PB to be compared to Spinal Tap.

"Part of the secret is that Reiner never stays with the same laugh very long. There are a lot of people for his characters to meet as they make their long journey, and most of them are completely off the wall."
-This is partly true, but one of the noted things about the PB is the same lines do come up again and again, to the point that one of the characters in the movies comments upon it at the end.

"There is, for example, a band of three brigands led by Wallace Shawn as a scheming little conniver and including Andre the Giant as Fezzik the Giant, a crusher who may not necessarily have a heart of gold. It is Shawn who tosses the princess to the Screaming Eels, with great relish."
-This is totally wrong--the princess jumps into the water to get away from the 'brigands,', the whole point is Shawn wants her to die on the border--not in some dark sea--so that he can start a war between two kingdoms. Andre the Giant at all times illustrates he does have a heart of gold, and ironically it's him who saves her from the eels, so that's made up too by Ebert or at least very clumsily written.

"Another funny episode involves Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, a heroic swordsman with a secret. And the funniest sequence in the film stars Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, both unrecognizable behind makeup, as an ancient wizard and crone who specialize in bringing the dead back to life. (I hope I'm not giving anything away; you didn't expect the princess's loved one to stay dead indefinitely, did you?)"
--Montoya has a secret to the extent he reveals it early in the film as soon as he gets a chance to talk a little--it's not something he even tries to keep secret, if anything he insists on broadcasting it. And his character is not defined as heroic--he's driven by a desire for revenge, while heroes generally are more selfless. The Crystal sequence is no way the funniest--and he (let alone they) doesn't specialize in bringing the dead back to life, it's miracles he specializes in. Ebert makes it seem that the princesses' beloved stays dead from when he's 'killed' by pirates until Crystal shows up, but that's not true either. And Crystal isn't unrecognizable behind makeup, his voice is the most distinctive thing about him and comes through loud and clear.

""The Princess Bride" was adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, which he says was inspired by a book he read as a child, but which seems to have been cheerfully transformed by his wicked adult imagination. It is filled with good-hearted fun, with performances by actors who seem to be smacking their lips and by a certain true innocence that survives all of Reiner's satire. And, also, it does have kissing in it."
-I mean, given that Ebert gets things wrong that I saw with my own eyes, who knows if these additional 'facts' are properly copied from the film's press packet or not....

I actually generally like Ebert as a reviewer because he watches interesting movies, and he doesn't get details wrong any more than any other reviewer. And in the grand scheme of things, it's not such a big deal that film reviewers make mistakes.

It's just odd--and it does make me wonder when I read things other journalists write about things that are not as easily independently verifiable.

Are we living in an age when most people, even those supposedly masters of their craft, lack the ability to closely-read/watch/listen?

Princess Bride production still of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn from Yahoo Australia movie page.

Going the way of the dodo?

White Flight in Silicon Valley As Asian Students Move In

Wall Street Journal: By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.

But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.

Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.

The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.

This has got to be one of my favorite articles of all time.

It's poorly written, and pretty close to racist--in order to create a context for the open racism of the white parents quoted and thus smooth their bigotry, the reporter uses 'Asian' instead of Asian-American as a way of ascribing otherness and foreignness to kids who in many cases were born and raised here.

But oh, the quotes--so full of unintentional irony. Most whites walk around with such an engrained sense of racial superiority that it's funny watching them spin anything that goes against their self-delusion.

So for example, as Asian Americans have started outperforming whites in school, Asian Americans have simply been put into a special non-counting class of their own, allowing headlines to continue reading 'Minorities score lower on test.'

But what happens when whites become not just the numerical, but also embarassingly obvious performance, minority?

At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers

In one 9th-grade algebra class, Monta Vista's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups.

"Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to."

Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says. ...

On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians.

Heh, heh; imagine, not being taken seriously, just because of the color of your skin! The nerve of people to have lower expectations of you and not listen to you just because of what you look like!

So what's a white parent to do? Tell your kid to study more and prepare for life in the wide-open 21st century? Nah, too hard.

Suck it up and reflect on the lessons of people in glass houses? Nah, too hard.

Spend more time with their kids and pay more than lip service to the importance of education? Nah, too hard.

Easier to just move.

As in move to another school. Or, easier yet, move the goalposts and redefine success. In the process, of course, let's be sure to definine Asian Americans as other, and denigrate their achievements.

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change. ...

The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether.

"It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."

Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population.

She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend.

"My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.

When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit. ...

"It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."

Oh well. The reality of the situation is demographically, whites are already minorities in many parts of the country--it's a trend that will only accelerate.

And the emergence of China and India on the world scene only emphasizes the fact that the world is not only flattening, but whites may even find themselves in the valleys at times. Since whites always like to use words like sea/hordes in conjuction with Asians and Asian Americans, it'd be funny if this torrent of high-achieving Asiatics actually does wind up burying whites in an ocean of mediocrity.

Whites are just going to have to learn to fit in, just as Hispanics and blacks and Asian Americans have always had to. White parents are going to have to start thinking about the importance of sending Johnny to school with the Hous of the world, because they want to prepare Johnny for a workplace where Hou is his boss and it's always good to rub shoulders with upper management. Gives you a better shot at getting invited to play golf at the country club, if nothing else.

In short, whites are going to have to become part of society, instead of blithely believing they are society.

What happens when a people who have been used to defining society and forcing others to adapt have to at times live by the rules and expectations of others?

What happens when a people who are always grumbling about having to tolerate others find themselves the ones being tolerated?

What happens when a people who are always lecturing others about the right way to do things find themselves at the back of the class?

What happens when a people who never thought of themselves as a people discover their assumptions and cultures are not only not universal, but may not even be competitive and thus have to change?

And what happens when a people used to peering at and analyazing 'minorities' as if they were some strange subspecies find themselves on the other end of the scope? The Internet has truly allowed a thousand flowers to bloom, just see Backlash of Wall Street Journal Story Reverberates in Bay Area Chinese Community .

I'd hope whites don't retreat to hide behind their gated communities and private schools. After all, society is richer when all members fully participate; we need a diversity of voices.

And don't worry, white parents, there's no doubt your children can do just as well as Asian American kids, given the same environment and encouragement.

Just have a little confidence in them--and yourself.

Photo of dodo bird in unspecified museum taken by V. K. Balagopal via Alphabetic Bird Photo Index.