NPR listens to some fascinating excerpts from newly released Supreme Court audio recordings going back to 1955. The clip from Roe vs. Wade is especially interesting.
“I’m not going to leave the Quiet Car,” I told him, “but since it’s bothering you, I will move to another seat.” He thanked me very courteously, as did the woman in front of me. “It really was quite loud,” she whispered.
When the train came to my stop I had to walk by his seat again on my way out. “Glad we could come to a peaceful coexistence,” I said as I passed. He raised a finger to stay me a moment. “There are no conflicts of interest,” he pronounced, “between rational men.” This sounded like a questionable proposition to me, but I appreciated the conciliatory gesture. The quote turns out to be from Ayn Rand. I told you we talked like this in the Quiet Car.
[via Kottke]
Is this the main reason we don’t have better mass transit in the U.S.?
American taxpayers will shell out many times what their counterparts in developed cities in Europe and Asia would pay. In the case of the Second Avenue line and other new rail infrastructure in New York City, they may have to pay five times as much.
Amtrak is just as bad. Its $151 billion master plan for basic high-speed rail service in the Northeast corridor is more expensive than Japan’s planned magnetic levitating train line between Tokyo and Osaka, most of which is to be buried deep underground, with tunnels through the Japan Alps and beneath its densest cities.
An interesting fact that’s mostly shoehorned into this David Brooks article:
Robert Oprisko of Butler University found that half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not. These other 100 schools don’t even want to hire the sort of graduates they themselves produce. They want the elite credential.
[via MR]
Simon Schama on Ian Fleming and British spy writers:
What these hoary pensioners all have in common is the talent to send up Britishness even as they affectionately rejoice in it. On this side of the pond (with the honorable exceptions of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and The Onion), you don’t dare celebrate America by mocking it. In Britain, where during the Olympics the queen became the latest of the Bond girls to surrender to the gentle joke, it’s virtually a patriotic obligation.
I didn’t plan on posting two look-at-America-through-British-media links today, but so it goes.
James Parker in this issue of The Atlantic on the appeals of Downton Abbey:
Americans eat this stuff up, of course. Why wouldn’t they? Class in America is not the ancient, neurotic, and quasi-magical apparatus that it is in Britain… Class in America is a greasy pole: you go up, you go down.
The first season was quite good, but the second did go too heavy on the soap.
I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor. One of these women was identified as a notorious nightclub singer whose heart he attempted to extract with his hands, and whom he then tried, and failed, to lower into a lake of magma. Another was a Nazi scholar he was seen courting just last year who, I’m told, plummeted into a fathomless abyss at Dr. Jones’s hand.
McSweeney’s, brilliant as usual.
This is easily the thing about Missouri I get asked most often.
“A high percentage of our politicians say Missouruh,” mused Lyle Anderson, the mayor of Lebanon, who prefers the other construction.
Such politicians include, historically, President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, and more recently, former Senators John Ashcroft and Christopher S. Bond, both Republicans. Today, most of the state’s top officials stick mostly to “Missouree,” but they sprinkle the other ending into the occasional speech, especially when they’re introducing themselves or speaking to rural audiences. Strategists say that’s just good Missouri manners.
In other news, strategists should never be consulted on manners.
Some sharp analysis on why Apple succeeds. Occasionally they’re the first with an idea, but most often they just do things better than those already doing them. My question: if that’s true, then how well does that lesson travel beyond consumer goods? Is the same thing true, say, of academic scholarship? {via DF}
A can’t-miss TED talk by Kirby Ferguson on why everything is a remix. This is why intellectual property is a contradiction in terms.
A fascinating talk by Benjamin Barber on the place of cities in a global age, cleverly titled “If Mayors Ruled the World.”
The attack ad has a long, long history. If only they were still this polite…
Visit an art gallery, or the office, from home using this iPad-teleconferencing-robot-thing-on-Segway-wheels. Incredible. {via DF}
Siri has come a long way from “Daisy.” Here’s a small collection of audio clips of speech synthesizers from the 20th century. Can you imagine hearing VODER for the first time?