Currently going through the backpile of magazines that have been accumulating. (“Accumulatte,” a cloudy coffee-flavored drink? Ahem.)
July reason [sic. Who do they think they are, Edward Estlin Cummings?—ed]. Jerry Jesness on “Stand and Deliver Revisited,” about Jaime Escalanate’s maverick AP Calculus program, its misrepresentation in the cinema, and how it withered without support (in fact, with palpable antipathy) from a complacent and entrenched educational administrative system. (Digression: Inner city school administrations seem to be interested in keeping their students ignorant. Could this be because the more students are retained, the more aid from higher levels of government they can cadge? Just a thought. If so, how is it to be stopped? If not, then why? Discuss.) It sounds like Mr Jesness has done more work than the relatively slim article warrants—this material would make for a book well worth reading. I would especially love to read or hear about individual AP Calculus students, who were only mentioned in aggregate (self-selected into the program, fully able to take on academic rigor, with 4s and 5s going to Havard, Yale, Berkeley, USC [go Trojans!], and UCLA [boo, hiss]).
Richard A Epstein takes issue with Loury’s new espousal of affirmative action laws, saying libertarian values argue for a private affirmative action, not a “ham-handed state mandate.”
August Utne Reader. I picked this one up after several years of sporadic purchasing because of its renewed interest in the concept of salons. I still have the original two issues that talked up salons and conversations, sometime around 1990. Colleges are the best places for conversation, where the whole purpose is a continued dialectic with received discourse, and many people of widely different backgrounds (hopefully) are crammed together in a relatively small area. Great conversations in the dorm suites at USC, Rutgers NCAS, Rutgers College Avenue and the local coffeeshops. And the university libraries! By God I swear I miss college.
What is the optimum size of a business? Banks seem to do best when they reach $100 million in assets. Globalization does not always work, and the article compares supermassive megacorps to state-sponsored socialism (Communism), invoking F Hayek to support the contention. It makes no mention of the Walton legacy though, which uses strong technology to offset the disadvantages that large corporate entities experience at the local level (think Soviet-era toilet paper lines).
Also, the BIBA, Boulder Independent Business Alliance, which supports local businesses against their huge rivals by offering incentives for consumers to buy locally, where the money is more likely to stay local.
All the time I am reading these articles, I am thinking about the mortuary model that the Six Feet Under characters are fighting against, with large conglomerates buying up local funeral homes while retaining local directors and staff to maintain community ties. I remember in St Louis, there was a large bookstore that was officially a Borders, yet had its own name and flavor, a charming place that did not feel like the mass-produced Borders out there. This would seem to be a great model for coffeeshops, where local décor and smarts indulge customers in their pursuit of quaintness and charm, while still having the capital behind them to weather a recession or put up wireless networks as the customers start bringing in laptops. Homogenization may still have to occur at the policy level, to protect from lawsuits. But local innovations that work can be shared with the parent and distributed to siblings in other areas to be tried or not, as the local talent judges their customer base. How much autonomy ought a local branch have? When should a parent step in and say, that would be deleterious for the bigger business? Advancement; but are local bookstore and coffeeshop owners interested in corporate advancement, anyway? Hm.
1:10:59 AM 
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