Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture? By Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan

In the 1980s, Mike Kinsley pioneered the "Diarist" page at the New Republic to provide a space for the kind of writing that was opinionated, yet personal, the kind of intimate writing that can easily embarrass the writer—to the great amusement of everyone else. Blogging has unleashed hundreds of thousands of such diarists on the world, and the variety, embarrassment, and tedium that ensue make for more compelling reading than much that is produced by people we call professional journalists. What some people view as the drawback of blogs—their personal, narcissistic potential—is, in my view, one of their greatest attractions.

Andrew Sullivan -- often right, never boring.  And I enjoyed Sullivan's dig at Rebecca Blood, perhaps more than I should have.  I guess I am still irritated by a self-important comment about the morality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being measured by the body count on each side.

Then again, after going back to Blood's site to look for the aforementioned passage, I was unable to find it.  I was also impressed once again by the scope and range of Blood's weblog, a scope and range to which I do not even aspire.  So I would like to give credit where credit is due.  Besides, she likes Yeats and Jane Austen's Persuasion.

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Worth Magazine Rates 100 Best Charities

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Students Getting a Wrong Number (washingtonpost.com)

"Close, but no points -- another sign of American students' problems with practical arithmetic, which many educators say is vital for daily life as well as school. And now a Brookings Institution researcher is saying that computation test scores are stagnating or declining in the United States and the government has covered it up."

The political agenda of the school system's most vocal critics (led by Lynn Cheney) is perhaps suspect, but in an age when students are allowed to use caculators in math class, it is no wonder they cannot multiply.  Learning arithmetic was a painful experience for me, and even today I am no wiz at it.  Sometimes, however, a little bit of pain is necessary for growth, and I do not think it makes sense to raise children who are dependent on a calculator in order to do arithmetic.  Not only is a calculator not always available, but the failure to learn to calculate effectively suggests a general lack of understanding of the most fundamental elements of mathematics.  Moreover, effectively marshaling knowledge requires a certain amount of rote memorization, and exercising this skill in children from early age -- within sensible limits -- is an essential part of education.  I have always thought that my generation had the right balance -- no calculators at all until high school, and then only in science class, not math class.

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McDonald's Plans to Cut Fat in Fries (washingtonpost.com)

"The nation's biggest hamburger restaurant chain says the new oil will halve the trans fatty acid levels in its french fries while increasing the amount of the more beneficial polyunsaturated fat. Health experts suggest that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated ones can help lower cholesterol levels."

While this is clearly as step in the right direction, it is hard to believe that anything will really make the french fry a healthy food choice.  McDonald's is doing its customers a much greater service by offering them inherently healthy choices such as salads and yogurt parfaits.

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America's Failed Frontier

"President Bush's support for agricultural welfare (with considerable Democratic backing) contradicts every value he stands for and reflects a complete capitulation to a calculus of vote-buying. America's rural policy today is about where Soviet industry was in the 1980's: the leadership knows that its policies have utterly failed but lacks the courage to reform them. "

Bad agricultural policy appears to have led to bad farming methods, which in turn leads to unhealthy food.  Perhaps it is time for the nation to rethink its entire relationship to food.

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