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Three students have committed suicide on the Cornell campus recently, including two last week, by jumping from bridges over the numerous gorges which run through campus. The mood is somber. We need to do a better job helping students keep life in perspective. We place...

The transparency President is now the President who feels your pain. According to the NY Times, in the State of the Union address Obama will unveil some highly targeted tax credits aimed at families, and some caps on student loan repayments: By focusing on what...

This will be my last post of the year, barring some high-profile conservative taking ill and being rushed to the hospital in which Barack Obama was not born just before he was born in that other hospital in the state where Rush Limbaugh is resting...

My home state of Rhode Island is quirky place. We still celebrate Victory Over Japan Day in August, although the name was changed to VJ Day and then to Victory Day, in a nod to political correctness. Now there is a move afoot to change...

I cannot comment on this diagnosis of clinical narcissism, since I only took Intro to Psychology in college, although I have commented on certain non-clinical aspects of the Won’s persona. But the author of the diagnosis in question poses a further question, so I’ll raise...

When I first started this blog just under a year ago, I was ignorant of who was who in the blogosphere. Believe it or not, Memeorandum is not the world. But I did know about Little Green Footballs. I’m not sure why. Over the months,...

With the politics which seems to dominate all our lives, it is easy to lose sight of what matters most. This afternoon the Cornell University community lost one of our undergraduate students to swine flu. As the father of three college-age students, my heart goes...

The media and left-wing blogosphere are in a tizzy because Virginia Republican candidate for Governor Robert F. McDonnell took negative positions on gay-rights and other topics in a university thesis 20 years ago. McDonnell now disavows those views, saying his views have changed over time,...

Gary Margolis, Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor in the English Department at Middlebury College in Vermont was moved to pen a poem in support of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The poem was titled “Ajar” and was published at the Boston...

I have not devoted much attention to the Barack Obama “Birth Certificate” conspiracy theories, because I have been bogged down debunking so many other conspiracy theories, like Andrew Sullivan’s Trig Palin birth conspiracy theory and the recent theory that the Bush administration “concealed” evidence as...

NY Times columnist Judith Warner writes today about “the fact that our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women is spiraling out of control.” Her proof? A college professor is being charged with child endangerment for dropping three young children (ages 3,...

In today’s New York Times, columnist David Brooks has a novel theory of why Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s Latina identity has worked its way into Sotomayor’s speeches, if not her judicial decisions: Blame it on the 1970’s. No, seriously. According to Brooks, Sotomayor had...

At a 2001 conference, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor uttered these now-famous words: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”...

Critics, including me, of Obama’s economic plans have made the point that the unprecedented huge deficits necessary to pay for expanded health insurance coverage, college education guarantees, the present and future “stimulus” plans, infrastructure projects, budget expansion, financing and operational takeovers of the auto industry...

I don’t think Jay Bybee (or Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo or Stephen Bradbury) are criminals. At worst, they expressed legal opinions on interrogation of terrorism suspects which a court may someday declare to be wrong. Bybee’s being wrong, if indeed he was, contributed to...