Category Archives: Current Affairs

I heard the NYT Magazine was doing a cover on young prodigies, and sure enough this morning a long article titled The Prodigy Puzzle was published this morning. It’s OK.

First, hearing about what some of these kids my age or younger are doing makes you feel quite small. If you browse this year’s Davidson Scholars, you will find 15-year-olds on a path to curing cancer, 17-year-olds writing complex novels, and a 6 year-old winning music competitions.

The meat of the article is around a booming movement to cultivate the prodigy. There was a book published a year or two ago which caused a great stir, since it said that all of our groundbreaking leaders of tomorrow were being ruined by poor education, and that we should shepard them away.

But, are overeager parents pushing too hard?

Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" – which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions – rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child’s giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus.

I don’t know…the odds are stacking up pretty well for me to be preeminent in something! Animus toward school, tolerance for solitude, and a house full of books.  Oh – and I’m nowhere close to being a valedictorian, which is also a good sign. I certainly ain’t gifted – dust patterns on the ceiling don’t interest me, and I would bomb the IQ test – but who knows, maybe one day I’ll be the world’s foremost authority on ping-pong.

The New York Review of Books always tackles issues with a thoroughness I enjoy. This time a writer provides a learned examination of the Islamic "madrasas" – essentially "schools" run by Islamic fundamentalists. Being a student, I have always thought that if we are to stop the Islamic Jihad we must stop students from being brainwashed at an early age. It’s appalling to hear about school textbooks in places in Pakistan advocating murdering Americans.

This article, though, makes the situation much more complex. Popular opinion says many of the terrorists are maniacs bred in these schools. In fact, most have college degrees, some from Western institutions, and are making calculated political gestures. Popular opinion says the madrasas are being run by militant fundamentalists. In fact, militants are in the minority.

A thought provoking read.

For those looking for great intellectual audio for the road or on an iPod during a workout, check out Stanford on iTunes, for faculty lectures, outside speakers, music and sports. Also don’t miss the University Channel, which aggregates speeches from campuses all over to provide "access to a world of ideas."

(Hat tip: Richard Kassissieh)

The notion of identity continues to fascinate me…What’s happening in France is a great example.

Link: What Makes Someone French? – New York Times.

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don’t think I’m French."

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country’s centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

One must be judicious in choosing how closely to follow the Iraq war. Every day there are many new analyses, updates, pictures, developments – many of them depressing. Every few weeks there will be recaps and an in-depth look at the state of Iraq at various milestones. Today the NYT Book Review section has a few articles which is my way of staying up-to-date: carefully read the periodic analyses and try to stay above the day-to-day minutia.

‘The Right War?’ and ‘A Matter of Principle’: Everybody Is a Realist Now is the best of the bunch. It fairly reviews a couple books that present the neoconservative view. It is important for anti-war activists to understand that people who still support the war do so because they believe the vision of spreading democracy is noble and liberating a people from a tyrant is morally necessary. Note how WMD was not mentioned here.

The national discussion should center on the issues raised in this article: Is spreading democracy in countries that have never had it before a mere pipe dream? Is there a moral imperative for the U.S. to act that should override any other metric, or is there some threshold of loss-of-life or money that makes war a bad idea? In the neoconservative vision, are we in Iraq for THEIR good (humanitarian reasons) or for OUR good? Which is more just?

Unfortunately, we seemed mired in Cindy Sheehan’s silly antics and the extreme left remaining absolutist in George W. Bush’s evilness.