The Association of Alternative News website features an interview with my friend, Boston civil-liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate about his work as a columnist. Harvey is the co-founder, with Alan Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on whose board I serve. Here's the beginning of the interview:
A lot of professionals are frustrated in their jobs because of what they see as corruption or incompetence in their field. Do you use your column to vent your frustration with your own field of work, the criminal-justice system?
Absolutely, and I'd say that's the main thing that I do with my column. What I find particularly galling is the extent to which reporters are taken in by prosecutors, to which they're taken in by courts. A court writes an extremely dishonest opinion where it mischaracterizes the facts of what happened, and the reporters never go to the record. They simply take the appeals court's word for it or the prosecutor's word for it, and I find that to be extremely aggravating.
When the Supreme Court came down with its Guantanamo "enemy combatant" opinions, in all the newspapers, I didn't read any reports that dissented from the judgment that the Supreme Court had struck down the Bush administration and rebuked it by insisting that it had to hold hearings for these "enemy combatants"; that they couldn't just snatch them off the street and put them away forever without any kind of hearing, trial, charges, nothing. If you read the controlling opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor closely, you saw that the nature of the hearing was a complete illusion and that under the rules that the Supreme Court set for what these hearings were supposed to be, no defendant could ever possibly win, ever.
Harvey's publications archive is on his website here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 16, 2005 • Comments
Congratulations to my friend Alan Kors, co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who received a National Humanities Medal last week. An intellectual historian specializing in Enlightenment thought, Alan is, among many other accomplishments, the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. He's also one of the star teachers whose lectures are featured on The Teaching Company's tapes and DVDs.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 16, 2005 • Comments
Bay Area artist Liz Hickok builds San Francisco cityscapes in molded Jello and records the results in photos or videos. It sounds like a gag, but the results are evocatively beautiful. For all its humorous wiggle factor, Jello is a gorgeous material. (Via Liquid Treat.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 11, 2005 • Comments
Joanne Jacobs was blogging before blogging was all the rage. Over the past five years, her blog has become one of the best specializing in education. In between posts, Joanne has written a book on a charter school in San Jose so inspiring that its story compelled her to quit her job at the San Jose Mercury News to write full time. Now that book, Our School, is out. Here's Joanne's description:
Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan) tells the story of a San Jose charter school that prepares students who are "failing but not in jail" for four-year colleges.
It really is an inspiring story. The average Downtown College Prep student comes from a Mexican immigrant family and enters ninth grade reading at a fifth grade level; 100 percent of graduates have been accepted at four-year colleges and 97 percent are on track to earn a bachelor's degree. DCP now scores well above the state average on the Academic Performance Index, ranking in the top third compared to all high schools, including affluent suburban schools. DCP follows what I call the work-your-butt-off philosophy of education. Its leaders analyze what's not working, adapt quickly and waste no time on esteem inflation or excuses.
While I discuss the charter school movement as a whole, Our School isn't written for wonks. I think it's a good read, sort of Tracy Kidder meets Up the Down Staircase.
My favorite part of the book is the part I didn't write. The book includes Pedro's rap, essays by Gil and Emilia, Roberto's speech, a discipline report on Hector, a teachers' list of DCP jargon, the principal's e-mail conversations with teachers, a phony field trip permission slip created by a girl who wanted a parent-free weekend, and a copy of the school's budget.
I'm looking forward to reading it. Now if Joanne can only sell the film rights...
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 10, 2005 • Comments
Tomorrow, Texans will vote on Proposition 2, a terribly drafted constitutional amendment designed to outlaw gay marriage and anything like it. How badly drafted? As Dallas lawyer and technoblogger John Lanius explains, if read literally it would outlaw all marriage. Courts aren't likely to interpret it that way, of course, but they'll have to give up literal readings to get a reasonable outcome--and "reasonable" almost certainly includes banning any kind of domestic partnership.
Since Texas already defines marriage by statute as the union of one man and one woman, Prop 2 is nothing more than a gratuitous attempt to build Gov. Rick Perry's social-conservative voting base by attacking gays. Supporters say an amendment is necessary to control "activist judges." But the only judges the amendment would bind are Texas state judges. Texas state judges, including the state's Supreme Court, are elected by Texas voters. Texas state judges are quite conservative. They are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely to find a right to same-sex marriage in the state constitution.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2005 • Comments
This reader email suggests that "Times Select" is costing the NYT more readers than it's supposed to.
Why are you still giving us only links to your NYT columns?
Now that we have to pay for access to the Times on line, most of us do not do so, and can no longer read Times stories or columns.
If you want us to read them, you'll have to post them on another server. If the Times won't let you, then I for one have no reason to read your stuff, anyway.
I know that you get paid for your writing, so my demanding to read it for free can sound churlish. But you were being paid before; the only difference now is the NYT on-line policy.
If the Times had in fact put my columns behind its pay-only wall, that would reduce the value of the column to me and essentially cut my pay. But that hasn't happened. My columns, like the vast, vast majority of NYT articles, are still available for free. And that, apparently, is exactly what they're worth to some people. (With my editor's permission, I do maintain an archive of columns on this site. The Times, however, owns all the reprint rights.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2005 • Comments
Thomas Fuller of the International Herald Tribune recently reported on the success of immigrants from the former East Bloc in the three EU countries that admit them without limits: the U.K., Ireland, and Sweden. All three economies are healthy, but is that cause or effect? Or, as I suspect, do both phenomena share an underlying cause? By European standards, all three regulate labor markets and business formation fairly lightly, though Sweden, of course, has famouslyl high taxes. Here's an excerpt from Fuller's article:
It turns out the doomsayers were partly right: Nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, floods of East Europeans have washed into Britain.
Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and other Easterners are arriving at an average rate of 16,000 a month, a result of Britain's decision to allow unlimited access to the citizens of the eight East European countries that joined the EU last year.
They work as bus drivers, farmhands and dentists, as waitresses, builders, and saleswomen; they are transforming parts of London into Slavic and Baltic enclaves where pickles and Polish beer are stacked in delicatessens and Polish can be heard on the streets almost as often as English.
But the doomsayers were also wrong: Multicultural Britain has absorbed these workers like a sponge. Unemployment is still rock-bottom at 4.7 percent, and economic growth continues apace.
Since May 2004, more than 230,000 East Europeans have registered to work in Britain, many more than the government expected, in what is shaping up to be one of the great migrations of recent decades.
Yet the government says it still has shortages of 600,000 workers in fields like nursing and construction.
"They are coming in and making a very good reputation as highly skilled, highly motivated workers," said Christopher Thompson, a diplomat at the British Embassy in Warsaw. "The U.K. is pleased with the way it's progressed over the first 16 months, and we're confident it will be a beneficial relationship for both sides in the future."
Tens of thousands of East Europeans have also moved to Ireland and Sweden, the only other West European countries that opened their labor markets to the new EU members.
With nearly full employment, Ireland's booming economy still needs workers, and immigration is actively encouraged. More than 128,000 East Europeans from the new EU member states registered to work in Ireland from May 2004 to August this year.
Irish society seems to be adjusting to the newcomers, 45,000 of whom come from Poland. A newspaper in Limerick now runs a column in Polish; last summer the national bus company began a daily service from Dublin to Warsaw.
The phenomenon is more subdued in Sweden, where about 16,000 workers from the new EU countries registered with the authorities between May 2004 and early October this year. A substantial majority, about two thirds, were Poles, followed by Lithuanians and Estonians.
Fearing a massive influx of East Europeans after enlargement, other West European countries threw up barriers that will be lowered only gradually over the next decade. A Pole seeking to work in France, for example, still needs to apply for a work permit. France issued 737 such permits to Poles in the 10 months after enlargement; that is the number of Poles who arrive in Britain every two days.
Poles who go to Britain, in contrast, do not need any special permission.
In fact, Britain is so eager to recruit more Poles, by far the largest group of entrants since May last year, that British embassy officials in Warsaw have distributed brochures at Polish unemployment offices "so that if people wanted to go to the United Kingdom they had good information," Thompson said.
My latest NYT column looks at scholarly research suggesting that the wave of immigration in the 1990s did not, in fact, depress overall wages of American-born workers. What both stories share in common is a dynamic perspective. Over time, immigrant workers don't just fill existing job openings. In aggregate, they add to the total resources available for economic growth, making new capital investment more profitable and native-born labor more potentially productive.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2005 • Comments
What's the value of a logo once the organization it symbolized no longer exists? What does it mean? Graphic designer Michael Bierut considers the preservation questions raised by the demise of the AT&T logo (a.k.a. the Death Star), a touchstone among designers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
Why was the sun rising as I walked to my Paris conference at 8:15 in the morning? I wondered. Thanks to Jim Lindgren, I now know the answer. In a "fall back" post on the Volokh Conspiracy, he explained:
It is pleasant traveling in France in the summer, which based on longitude should be on Greenwich time along with England, but instead is an hour ahead of London; the sun often goes down after 9:30pm. In effect, France and Spain are on double Daylight Saving Time in the summer and single Daylight Saving Time in the winter.
Peter Galison's book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time details the intense Anglo-French rivalries over where to draw the time-establishing prime meridian.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments
D Magazine publisher Wick Allison says rumors are flying that Harriet Miers might run for mayor of Dallas. Sounds crazy to me, but Wick claims "she would be inundated with campaign donations."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 01, 2005 • Comments