Archive for the ‘Good news’ Category

December 24th, 2008

The Obama science team needs more social scientists and a global perspective.

October 6th, 2008

This is written as the Dow is sinking almost 7% through about 9600, after a similar day on foreign markets. The judgment of investors isn’t the rousing endorsement of the bailout some had hoped for. And Floyd Norris passes on the following CNN poll result: As you may know, the U.S. went through a depression [...]

October 1st, 2008

Some good news on the urbanism and climate change front: Schwarzenegger backed down from initial veto threats and signed SB 375, which, as the title of this post suggests, might actually be the most important smart growth bill in history. Other states have done some work in this area, most notably Maryland under former Governor [...]

September 27th, 2008

Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich, you are among the things I count myself lucky to be contemporary with. I invoke the spirit of the immortal Cole. I don’t have anything in particular in mind, just the whole two packages of sanity, wit, perspicacity, and wisdom. When I grow up, I want to be just like [...]

September 25th, 2008

I just noticed the “Good News” category and felt drawn to post something in it. Let’s see: the economy is liable to fall off a cliff if we don’t enact desperate, expensive measures - that may actually aggravate the situation. Our foreign policy is unraveling from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, and North Korea is [...]

July 30th, 2008

I certainly didn’t; but it’s true. Turns out her father was Jewish, and then she subsequently converted. (To my mind, this suggests that Torres strongly identifies as Jewish, as Reform Judaism accepts patrilineal descent for the purposes of determining who is Jewish). So there’s someone who is Jewish but has a Latino surname. I can’t [...]

April 11th, 2007

The choice of Dick Cheney as commencement speaker is drawing protests: at Brigham Young University.

April 9th, 2007

When I moved to Northern California from Boston in the early 90s, I realized quickly that things were different here. At my old job, I had more than a hundred faculty colleagues including no tenured blacks or women, and not one that I knew to be gay (of course Harvard has come a long way [...]