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For one naïve and splendid moment last spring, the newspaper romantics of New York believed they had a chance to claim the Post as their own. While lawyers piled up fortunes haggling over who would own the paper and who would owe what to whom, reporters in the riverfront newsroom paced nervously on a carpet the color of dried blood. "I hate this," one reporter, Colin Miner, said. "I just want to get back to dead bodies and chalk lines." Miner was young and had been only recently hired, but he had thoroughly inhaled the spirit of South Street. Meanwhile, Pete Hamill, the momentary editor of the paper and its would-be Lord Byron, sat near his office window and watched a loaded barge glide into the spidery shadows cast by the Brooklyn Bridge.
"You wanna know what I think would be God's paper?" Hamill said, rising from his chair. (He was then assuming that the Post might be his to reinvent.) "It would be a tabloid that's smart and hip, knowing. The tone of Rupert Murdoch's papers was always naïve, like 'Holy Shit! They're Having Sex!' You can have classic tabloid sex and violence, but better, well written, and accurate. God's paper would have a coalition of audiences. We'd appeal to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Dominicans, Ecuadoreans, Haitians—the new immigrants. That's New York's future salvation. Anyone who still reads a newspaper is part of an aspiring class—the people who aren't zonked out yet on 'Wheel of Fortune.' We'd try to get the kids of the immigrants, the first generation of English-speakers. Cover immigration. Have a green-card columnist. Make a feature section. Cover the streets. Even the foreign stuff would reflect the community. Cover the best murder trial in Tel Aviv. Get into the Caribbean. The paper's got to reflect the city more accurately than by just having drug dealers and guys in handcuffs plastered across the front page."
Hamill, who had made a career as a columnist by evoking a chiaroscuro New York of noble pugs and clubhouse hacks, was dreaming. And, what was more, he knew it. From the beginning, Rupert Murdoch had been the only participant in the negotiations with the will and the means to win the Post, and he would never hand the paper over to the likes of Hamill. It was depressing, then, to hear the cheer go up in the newsroom when it was finally announced that the owner of the Post would indeed be Rupert, Redux. Some jobs had been saved (though not Colin Miner's), but the Post would go on as a cynical paper—a right-wing feuilleton for the city's conservatives and an object of high camp for the rest. Still, it had been fine to hear a newspaperman dream, if only for a little while.
Just before Hamill gave way to the inevitable, he'd said he thought that one of the greatest models for any other newspaper was the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward. Like most Irish Catholics of his generation, Hamill's fluency in Yiddish was limited to words for sandwich meats and forms of human stupidity: it was the idea of the Forward he was responding to—the Forward as the king of New York's ethnic newspapers. For more than a hundred and fifty years, publishers in New York have put out papers to capture the new arrivals at Ellis Island and Castle Garden and J.F.K. as they stood blinking into the sun, starved for news and instruction. The best of those papers have been immigration primers, guides to the mysteries and manners of the New World. Signs of the old immigrations persist. France-Amérique, which began publication in 1828, is hanging on, if barely, and so is the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (1834). Il Progresso (1880) folded in 1989, having been overtaken by a new Italian daily, America Oggi. (Ethnic papers have a way of breeding before they die. Staats-Zeitung was the Teutonic seedling from which the Ridder half of the Knight-Ridder chain bloomed, while the publishers of Il Progresso, at one time a pro-Mussolini paper, begat the old New York Enquirer, which begat the National Enquirer.) In all, there are more than a hundred ethnic papers in around thirty languages published in the city, and while it is sad that there are no longer, say, eight important Chinese papers, it is remarkable that there are still four. There are also papers published in Arabic, Armenian, Creole, Estonian, Hungarian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian, Romansh, and Tagalog.
The Forward, which was founded in 1897, is not the oldest, but it is the model, the exemplar. At the peak of its influence, in the twenties, its circulation exceeded a quarter of a million, and in 1947 its fiftieth anniversary was celebrated at Madison Square Garden. It was once so powerful a paper that it helped engineer the election of a Socialist, Meyer London, to Congress. (That happened in 1914.) But no more. The Forward has been a weekly for a decade, and, having reached the age of ninety-six, it will count itself lucky if it can celebrate its centenary. It is written in a dying language for a geriatric population. Circulation is sclerotic, fourteen thousand being the official, and highly generous, assessment. Mordecai Strigler, a diminutive scholar with thick glasses and titanic energy, who is the present editor, has so much trouble finding writers able to communicate in Yiddish that he often writes half the paper himself. Over a period of forty years, he has used about thirty pseudonyms, A. Kore (A Reader), A. Ben-Ami (Son of the People), M. Ragil (A Simple Person), and Z. Kamai (An Old-Fashioned Man) among them. The most reliably generous section of the paper is the obituaries. Such is the state of Yiddish. In her story "Envy, Or Yiddish in America" Cynthia Ozick wrote, "Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil?"
The Forward these days is the product of four full-time staff members. Strigler is seventy-two, and the three others—the managing editor, Joseph Mlotek; the contributing editor, Abraham Wilk; and the news editor, Jacob Goldstein—are even older. "I come in, and here someone is sick, there someone is sick, so I have to finish things on my own," Strigler told me one afternoon. He slumped in his chair and raised his brows, Yiddishly, toward Heaven. "What can I do?"
The Forward's offices are in the Workmen's Circle building, on East Thirty-third Street, a flavorless site compared with the former headquarters, down on East Broadway. (The old Forward building, with some of its Yiddish pediments still in place, is now a Chinese cultural center.) By newspaper standards, the offices are quiet and trig. They reflect the prim neatness of the aged. But the modern era does intrude. Management has replaced the old Linotype machines with Apple computers and Yiddish software. And although the paper has a tradition of left-leaning secularism, the typesetters are Orthodox, since it is the Orthodox, and especially the Hasidim, who keep Yiddish alive as a language of daily conversation. (Hebrew, the sacred tongue, is usually reserved for prayer and religious scholarship.)
"The older people don't want to hear it when you say it's all dying," Strigler told me recently. "The Lubavitcher Hasidim speak Yiddish, but they don't want to read our writing. They have their own separate world—even their own paper, Algemeiner Journal. I don't know who I'm writing for anymore. Maybe two hundred younger people read us. But they are passive. They are not in the conversation. They are only observers of this old world. My daughter tries now to learn Yiddish. She is twenty-five. She's very interested. But if she and her generation will be readers of our newspaper I don't believe it. It's too late, because there are pockets of speakers but they don't have what to do. If they can be a rabbi or a lawyer, what have they to do with us?" Fortunately for Yiddish, Strigler's energy is legion. He edits the Forward in the morning and then walks to another office, in Chelsea, to put together a distinguished Yiddish-language magazine of politics and culture, the biweekly Yiddisher Kemfer (The Fighter). It is as if one man were running (and largely writing) both the Times and The New York Review of Books.
Like so many of his colleagues and his readers, Strigler has led the epic life of a survivor. Born near the Polish city of Lublin, he was ordained as a rabbi when he was sixteen. As a teacher in Warsaw, he was thrown into the crucible of the war with Germany. When the Nazis broke through the barricades with their tanks, the Poles pointed to him and said, "Jew." The Nazi soldiers hauled Strigler off to a concentration camp, and carved swastikas into his cheeks and forehead with a razor blade. Over the next five years, he was sent from one concentration camp or slave-labor camp to another. He lost his parents and four of his sisters in the Holocaust. In 1945, an American journalist and writer named Meyer Levin went to the Buchenwald camp after it was liberated, and there he interviewed Strigler for what became the book "In Search." Strigler described how he managed, mostly through sheer luck, to survive to the end of the war. He talked of how Nazi soldiers beat him and confiscated his manuscripts, how he saw them order people shot as unfit because of the slightest blemish. After a roundup of Jews in the Lublin area, "our camp was put on the march," Strigler said. "We had to go fifteen miles, in a column ten abreast. They told us to run, and they rode alongside the column and fired into it all the time, our comrades dropped around us, and we filled up to ten abreast and ran, and they shot, shot, shot." Once they had been herded into the Ishbitza ghetto, about thirty miles away from Lublin, a mass, orgiastic slaughter began. "I saw a German officer go up and look over a pretty little girl of thirteen who had just been taken off a train. Then he calmly took out his bayonet knife and ripped up her belly. I saw this."
Strigler has always been a remarkably prolific writer. Even now, he is capable of writing a dozen articles a week on topics as various as Israel, New York politics, Biblical commentary, and the fate of Yiddish. But after he was released from Buchenwald he moved to Paris, and there he wrote as if truly possessed, spinning out a vast cycle of semifictional books on the Holocaust, which were among the first eyewitness accounts of horror: "Maydanek," in 1947; "In Di Fabrikn Fun Toyt" ("In the Factories of Death"), in 1948; "Verk 'Tse' " ("Plant C"), in 1950; and "Goyroles" ("Destinies"), in 1952. In 1953, he came to America, and he has worked here as a journalist in the Yiddish world ever since. Late in 1986, he became the editor of the Forward, succeeding the late Simon Weber. He does not wish to be its last editor, but that could turn out to be the case.
"A few years ago, I went out and tried to find an apprentice, but it was impossible," Strigler said. "To tell you the truth, I am sure in a year or two I will not be here. Maybe I'll go to Israel. My wife was a teacher at Hebrew University, and I don't know how long we'll stay here. They tell me that I can't move to Israel, that I'm the last one that can edit the paper. That's what they tell me." Harold Ostroff, the general manager of the Forward Association, which runs the paper, does all he can to cajole Strigler into staying. When I asked Ostroff if he would be able to find a replacement, he said, "There may be someone in this world. I don't see anyone in America." The decline of writers and of the circulation is so profound, Ostroff said, that he was already thinking about going monthly, if need be.
Even in its dotage, the Forward must evoke in the greatest newspaper dynasties (to say nothing of Murdoch, of the Post, or Mortimer Zuckerman, of the News) a sense of awe. The Forward grew out of an immigration of more than two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1925—an immigration that rivals the current influx of Dominicans and Chinese, and one that forever shaped the texture of New York life. The demand for Yiddish publications in New York was so great that by 1914 more than a hundred and fifty daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and occasional journals were appearing.
Abraham Cahan, an editor of literary genius and imperious character, ruled the Forward in its golden decades—the first half of this century. Cahan had grown up in academic and revolutionary circles in Lithuania, and after he arrived in the United States, in 1882, he made a literary name for himself even before the Forward came into being. In 1895, he published a realistic novella of Jewish life on the Lower East Side. The headline over William Dean Howells' review of "Yekl, a Tale of the New York Ghetto," in the New York World, read, "THE GREAT NOVELIST HAILS ABRAHAM CAHAN, THE AUTHOR OF 'YEKL,' AS A NEW STAR OF REALISM, AND SAYS THAT HE AND STEPHEN CRANE HAVE DRAWN THE TRUEST PICTURES OF EAST SIDE LIFE." Cahan worked for four years at English-language newspapers, most notably with Lincoln Steffens at the Commercial Advertiser, covering murders, fires, Ellis Island, and the exploits of Buffalo Bill. By the time he settled at the Forward, in 1901, he had in mind a unique paper: one that would be a mix of shund and literatur—sensationalism and seriousness. He printed feature stories about the prostitutes on Allen Street and the peddlers on Delancey Street. He provided instructions in how to use a handkerchief, when to say "Pardon me," how to get along with the neighbors in a communal apartment. He advised parents to feed their children fresh fruits and vegetables. He ran a contest in which readers were asked for the best definition of the word mazel ("luck"), and printed a seminal front-page story headed "THE FUNDAMENTALS OF BASEBALL EXPLAINED TO NON-SPORTS," which was accompanied by a helpful diagram of the Polo Grounds. At the same time, he printed fiction, essays, and poems by all the great names in Yiddish literature—an accomplishment that was celebrated when Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had first published almost all of his fiction in the Forward, won the Nobel Prize, in 1978.
The Forward under Cahan, Ronald Sanders wrote in his 1969 book "The Downtown Jews," was "a kind of running Talmudic text for the secular cultural life of the Yiddish-speaking masses." Cahan was their secular rabbi, helping them ease their way into the New World. By far the paper's most popular feature was called "A Bintel Brief" ("A Bundle of Letters"), in which readers gave voice to their most personal concerns and posed plaintive questions. Cahan had pleaded with his readers to "send us emmeser romanen"—true-life novels—and the readers responded with remarkably vivid descriptions of tenement life and spiritual confusion. The column, readers said, was like a combination of Dear Abby and Talmudic argument. One worried young woman wrote, "Is it a sin to use face powder? Shouldn't a girl look beautiful? My father does not want me to use face powder. Is it a sin?" Elsewhere, mothers living in bleak poverty wondered if they should put their children up for adoption.
When the occasion demanded it, Cahan was also able to mobilize a skilled group of reporters to cover the news at least as well as the city's English-language papers. On March 25, 1911, a huge fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a ten-story loft near Washington Square. The fire raged through the top three floors, where hundreds of girls and young women worked at their sewing machines. Fire engines arrived within ten minutes, but they could do little to stop the blaze. The water from their hoses reached only to the seventh floor and their ladders only to the sixth. Under the headline "THE MORGUE IS FULL OF OUR DEAD," the poet and Forward reporter, Morris Rosenfeld, pieced together an astonishing account of the tragedy:
**{: .break one} ** Forlornly [the crowd on the street] stood and watched as one girl after another fell, like shot birds, from above, from the burning floors. The men held out a longer time, enveloped in flames. And when they could hold out no longer, they jumped, too. Below, horrified and weeping, stood thousands of workers from the surrounding factories. They watched moving, terrible, unforgettable scenes. At one window on the eighth floor appeared a young man with a girl. He was holding her tightly by the hand. Behind them the red flames could be seen. The young man lovingly wrapped his arms around the girl and held her to him a moment, kissed her, and then let her go. . . . A moment later he leaped after her, and his body landed next to hers. Both were dead. **
There were a hundred and forty-six dead, all told, and a hundred thousand people marched in a mass funeral ceremony.
Cahan was widely criticized among more religious and more intellectual Yiddish editors as a philistine bent on driving his audience into assimilation. And they were right: the Forward under Cahan was indeed a powerful instrument of assimilation. These days, Strigler and his colleagues like to say, with a sigh, that perhaps the paper did its job so well that it has put itself nearly out of business. The Forward, like the language itself, is in its preservationist stage. Aaron Lansky, a remarkable young man who in 1989 won a MacArthur "genius" award for rescuing hundreds of thousands of Yiddish books, told me, "My grandfather was a junkman in Fall River, Massachusetts, and he depended on the Forward for news. Who does that anymore? I'm afraid I can't think of anyone I know who reads it regularly, even in my circle of Yiddishists. Maybe this tells the whole story. The Hasidim speak Yiddish, but they will not read modern, secular Yiddish literature. To them, it is heretical. One night, I got a call from a Brooklyn collector who told me I had to come right away to Brooklyn, to Brighton Beach, to something called the Beth Am Center, an old Zionist labor center that was now being sublet to the Orthodox as a yeshiva. He had discovered that when the Orthodox moved in they found a library of fifteen thousand Yiddish books and threw them all down the cellar stairs. When we came to get the books, the Orthodox just glowered at us. For them, those books were heretical, because they discussed how Jews might live in a modern world. It is a great irony that the last Jews who speak Yiddish will not read these great books, let alone the Forward."
I doubt if there is any one paper in New York that is a worthy successor to the Forward. The Novoye Russoye Slovo (New Russian Word), which is the leading paper in Brighton Beach, is distinctively Russian, with its passion for long opinion pieces, but it lacks the flair of the best Moscow papers. El Diario-La Prensa is the leading Spanish-language paper, with a circulation of fifty thousand, and features a broad range of opinion pieces, from conservative attacks on Fidel Castro to liberal pieces on Central and South America. But by trying to be an umbrella paper for all the Hispanic groups in the city it shows how radically different the interests of the city's Cubans and Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians are. The various groups are often better served by the imported papers available in Hispanic neighborhoods and at stores like Hotaling's, just off Times Square, that specialize in out-of-town publications. Caribbeans, too, have New York-based papers, but the imports, like the Gleaner, from Jamaica, are more popular.
Perhaps the most ambitious and among the wealthiest of the ethnic papers is the World Journal, which is a daily financed by a Taiwan conglomerate and is the leading Chinese-language paper in the country. Tih-Wu Wang, the Citizen Kane of the conglomerate, is a gigantic figure in Taipei. A former member of Chiang Kai-shek's military, he traded on his political and business connections to build a chain of papers in both Taiwan and North America. "The legend is he used to deliver his papers on a bicycle at the start, and now he might as well have a license to print money," Justin Yu, the World Journal's immigration and crime reporter, told me over a long lunch one afternoon on Mott Street. "Mr. Wang comes on Chinese New Year and holds a banquet at the Sheraton he owns, near LaGuardia. Everyone gets an envelope with a bonus."
T. W. Wang is in his eighties and is sitting on a fortune. Taiwan sources say that years ago he bought a mountain on the island, and on that mountain he built a palace, and in that palace he built a glass floor with gold carp swimming underneath. It was a pretty effect, but this Xanadu made some squeamish local politicians very unhappy all the same, because it seemed to them an unnecessary flaunting of wealth. Soon it was announced that the estate would become a vacation center for employees. "Mr. Wang is a great story," Justin Yu said. "He even thought about buying the Daily News. But the American market is just a chicken leg compared to what he wants. It's peanuts compared to China."
For the World Journal, which was founded in 1976, the story that ranks in importance with the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was the tragedy of the Golden Venture, the freighter that ran aground on the beach at Far Rockaway last June loaded with hundreds of Chinese. Justin Yu and his partner, Alex Peng, covered the story with speed and grace, not least because they had been following the nuances and cruelties of illegal immigration from China to New York for years. Justin, who tends to do most of his phone work and writing while he is sitting at a small table at the back of his wife's toy store, in Chinatown, told me, "All the illegals come through the store. When someone comes into the toy store to buy a toothbrush, I know he's illegal and green, right off the boat. I get all my stories that way. One guy told me how he got to Houston via Mexico via Belize and how soldiers escorted him across the Rio Grande. They took a small airplane from Mexico to the desert and were met by a minivan and driven eight or nine hours to Los Angeles. Then they came here because there are no Fukinese in Los Angeles. The Fukinese own the bad carryout places. You know, the homeless live on that two-dollar fried rice the Fukinese make."
Alex Peng makes his reporting rounds driving an old Lincoln and wearing two beepers on his belt. Husky and intense, he is sometimes described as the Chinese Jimmy Breslin. Peng doesn't resent the label, despite Breslin's outburst a couple of years ago when he called a Korean-American colleague at Newsday "slant-eyed" and a "yellow cur." Peng said, "I fully understand that Jimmy Breslin's reputation is no good among Asians, but he is an energetic, dynamic journalist. I learned a lot from him, just by reading. He is always there, and that's a rule: You gotta be there, you always go. If you sit in the office and work the phone, you get another kind of story."
New York's Chinatown is no longer limited to lower Manhattan, and one day recently Alex and I were in the Queens division, in Flushing, where many of the most prosperous Asians—from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea—have settled. (Country folk from China itself are more likely to live in the overcrowded apartments in Manhattan.) Alex switched on a tape of one of his favorite singers, Engelbert Humperdinck, gunned the engine, and hummed lightly. I told him about the letters that used to appear in the Forward's "Bintel Brief"—letters from parents who feared that their children were losing their Yiddish and their ties to Jewish culture.
"Yeah, sure. We get letters like that," he said. "Like 'My children won't go to weekend Chinese school and can't talk Chinese. What should I do?' Or 'My kids won't eat Chinese food. What should I do?' Nothing changes."
The World Journal publishes service information for immigrants, just as the Forward did—information on how to apply for a Social Security card, where to register to vote, where to collect your car if it has been towed, the schedule of the public libraries. But where the World Journal falls short is in its lack of independence. According to some members of the Chinese-speaking community, none of the Chinese papers in New York have shown that they are able to write in detail about, for example, the dominance of the Tongs of organized crime. The World Journal and the three other Chinese papers—the Hong Kong-financed Sing Tao, the local United Daily, and the Beijing-sponsored China Press—all tend to skip lightly over areas considered too delicate to mention. When unionized waiters at the Silver Palace, a vast dim-sum emporium on the Bowery, picketed the restaurant last August because the owners wanted to cut their health insurance and take a percentage of the tips, the papers responded with minimal, euphemistic coverage. Because nearly all the other waiters in China–town are not even unionized, and because the Tongs are so deeply involved in the restaurant business, the case had enormous importance for the community. It fell largely to the English-language press to cover the story.
Such limited coverage doesn't seem to bother even the best of the World Journal's reporters—or not enough, at least. "News is business," Alex said. "Keep that in mind. Don't position yourself as a gatekeeper or a social conscience. Of course, we talk about all that, but news is business. If there is no profit, why you wanna do that? You are not the Salvation Army. C'mon, gimme a break!"
As we drove on through Flushing, Alex said that, like the editors of the Forward, he and his colleagues who grew up speaking and reading Chinese see their own children becoming Americanized. They can speak and understand Chinese but not read it. The World Journal will not be their paper. They, too, will drift toward the News, the Post, the Times, and, most of all, to television. "We're not counting on the younger generations to be our readers, but we have the confidence that we will always be a bridge for the newcomers," Alex said. "My kids seem to pick up their language from TV and the street. The other day, my four-year-old called me a schmuck. What language is that?"
In the end, one of the papers that seemed most promising on my search through the city's ethnic press was the English-language edition of the Forward. Started in 1990, it is a gigantic leap beyond much of the rest of the mainstream Jewish English-language press, which is generally so beholden to the Jewish charities for funding that it is no less cautious than World Journal and Sing Tao; the slant is often so acute that one anticipates the millennium headline "WORLD ENDS YESTERDAY; JEWS SUFFER MOST."
The idea for an English-language Forward had been drifting around the paper's offices ever since the other Yiddish papers in the city, like the Tog (the Day), began closing, in the early nineteen-seventies. But there was always resistance. What did English have to do with the Forverts? It was not until the early nineteen-eighties that someone came along who was ready to push the idea, and he was from outside the paper: Seth Lipsky, one of the leading writers and editors at the Wall Street Journal. Lipsky was an editor for the paper in Europe and Asia and also a member of its conservative editorial board. Like his mentor on the editorial page, Robert Bartley, he was, and still is, capable of writing in a mode just short of savagery. But, as happens with many editors easing into middle age—Lipsky is forty-seven—there came a time when he wanted his own show to run. The notion of an English Forward appealed to him more for reasons of the paper's history than out of any allegiance to Yiddishkeit. He is, of course, Jewish, but the extent of his attachment to religious custom was revealed to me one afternoon when we sent out for sandwiches. "Ham and cheese on rye, for me," he said. The Forward, Lipsky was quick to remind me, has always been a secular paper.
For years, Lipsky waged a campaign of noodging the Forward hierarchy—especially Simon Weber, who in 1970 had succeeded Abraham Cahan as editor, and who retained a great deal of influence at the paper even after Strigler became editor, at the end of 1986. Lipsky tried over and over again to convince the Forward Association that an English-language edition—not a mere translation but a separate entity—could one day turn a profit, and would almost certainly be a boon to Jewish journalism and learning. In advancing this cause, Lipsky visited Weber in the hospital, where the older man was recovering from a broken hip. "He was seventy-three, and in seventy-three years I don't think he'd ever heard an idea that he regarded as quite as insane as mine," Lipsky told me. "The Forward's cause was secular Jewish language and literature, and along comes this kid from the Wall Street Journal."
The idea went nowhere until the spring of 1987, when Weber was in the hospital once more—this time with a general breakdown of his health. By then, Weber had taken a liking to Lipsky, a man of firm opinions ("I'm a hardheaded liberal, you might say") and tart good humor. There was an odd friendship between them, but the idea of an English Forward was still not moving ahead. This time, Lipsky was merciless.
"Si, look," he said. "You are on your deathbed, and in a matter of months you'll be gone. And, if you don't do something, your newspaper is going to be gone with you. So if you are not willing to receive my emissary for me you should be willing to receive him for the sake of the Forward. And I expect you to do it."
Weber was silent a long time. And then he said, with his inimitable Old World gutturals, "And khooo is this emissary?"
"It's Sam Pisar," Lipsky said.
Weber was impressed. "Pisar," he said. "He can make things khappen."
Pisar, an international lawyer and a survivor of Auschwitz, met with Weber and the members of the Forward Association in Weber's hospital room, and could see that some of them were receptive to the idea of an English paper. They agreed to receive Lipsky.
"I came back from China to New York at my own expense," Lipsky said, recalling the meeting. "We met on a Saturday morning. I felt like Judge Bork going before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Everything was friendly, O.K., and then Sam turns to me and says something that made me realize why he's so brilliant. He said, 'Seth, they don't want to know about the easy questions. They want to know about the difficult questions.'
" 'Like what, Sam?' I said.
"And he said, 'Like Jabotinsky. Where are you on Jabotinsky?'
"A chill fell over the room. It was like walking into a meat locker. I knew right away that this was the most important moment of my life."
It might well be appropriate at this juncture to explain the significance of the chill in the room. It was Theodor Herzl who founded modern Zionism, from a centrist, assimilated, slightly left-leaning bent. His opponent in tactics and temperament was Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian newspaperman who believed (some have said believed fanatically) in an armed struggle to create Israel. Jabotinsky organized the Haganah self-defense movement and advocated a "greater" Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. When the state was formed, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hung portraits on the wall of Herzl and Chaim Weizman. But when Menachem Begin took office, in 1977, he added one more portrait—that of Jabotinsky.
Lipsky went on, "So, finally, I said, 'I know how you feel about Jabotinsky and how he appeared to your generation. But to my generation—or, at least, to me, looking back—the outstanding fact of Jabotinsky's life is that he called for the evacuation of the Jews from Europe in 1932.' What I was trying to say was that I don't want to fight about the past, but if you really want to I'll try to get down and mud-wrestle with you. After that, the conversation returned to an amicable plane."
Lipsky's dream was not realized until the Forward Association had a financial windfall. For many years, the association had owned the radio station WEVD-FM, named in honor of the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs. Known some time ago as "the station that speaks your language," WEVD featured programming in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish. But with time some of those languages died out in the city, and some became so prevalent that they had their own stations. WEVD was, as a business, losing ground. Then, in 1989, the Spanish Broadcasting System decided it needed a New York flagship, a fifty-thousand-watt FM station. Not only did WEVD have the power but it was one of only thirteen stations with access to the transmission tower on the Empire State Building. The SBS and the Forward Association cut a deal. Harold Ostroff, who conducted the negotiations for the Forward Association, said that the total package should ultimately be worth sixty-five million dollars. Though much of the money will be a long time coming in, even a fraction of it was enough to make viable the idea of maintaining the Yiddish Forward while starting an English-language edition. Lipsky published his first issue on May 25, 1990.
To all who ask, Lipsky spins out a ditzy theory of how the English Forward could go from its current circulation, of thirteen thousand five hundred, to something five times, even fifteen times, as big. His fantasy, like Pete Hamill's dream of God's tabloid, is part mist, part ideology. "My theory about the newspaper market is that the billionaires circling the city look only at the tabloid flank, but the weak flank in New York is the Times," he said. "The Times was built on a constituency of hardheaded liberals—largely Jews, though not exclusively. That constituency is shrinking in stunning numbers. The proprietors of the Times have two choices: either shrink, which is not logical, or abandon their traditional constituency and purpose, and pursue a much more culturally diverse constituency—the African-Americans, the Hispanics. They are fine constituencies, but such a move will change the content of the Times. And that will leave only one broadsheet in New York in a position to focus on that original constituency of the New York Times and to grow, especially as a daily. And that will be the Forward."
At the instant my eyebrow lifted, Lipsky smiled.
"I see you are dubious of the proposition."
Perhaps so.
"Well, look at it this way," Lipsky went on. "You have seventeen hundred dailies in America, and more than half of them have circulations under fifty thousand. A daily that takes in a profit can be sold for the price of a supertanker."
While Lipsky waits out that part of his dream, it is worth noting that the editorial contents of the English-language Forward—especially the aggressive news coverage and the sophisticated arts pages—are worthy of the Yiddish paper. From the start, Lipsky hired a range of quirky young talent, including one writer, Ilene Rosenzweig, whose previous employment had been with Street News, the paper of the homeless, and who is the author of "The I Hate Madonna Handbook." Recently, he hired as executive editor Lucette Lagnado, late of the Post and the Village Voice, where she was the "Urban Guerrilla" columnist. Lipsky and Lagnado have published some excellent pieces from Moscow, Washington, and Jerusalem as well as irreverent coverage of the world of Jewish politics and culture. There has been a string of fine articles by Jeffrey Goldberg, late of the Washington Post and the Israeli Defense Forces, on the feuds within the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, and investigative reports on alleged fraud in Orthodox communities regarding medical insurance and state educational grants. "We don't have any sacred cows, kosher or otherwise," Goldberg told me. "We want to cover the Jewish community as rigorously as the Times or the News covers City Hall. We don't have that not-in-front-of-the-goyim sensibility." According to associate editor Jonathan Rosen, the virtue of the Yiddish Forward is "that it took the imagination as seriously as news." So, too, with the English edition. The paper has run excerpts from Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock," David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom's Biblical study "The Book of J," and, in serial form, the second volume of Art Spiegelman's "Maus," the cartoon saga of the Holocaust and the relationship between the artist and his survivor-father which won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Spiegelman, for his part, admires Lipsky's news columns—"Their anti-Semite watch is a good one, and they have a nice Diaspora beat." But he was astonished at the hawkish tone the editorial page took during the Gulf War. In despair, Spiegelman nearly pulled his strip, he said, "but the war ended too soon for me to act." No matter how conservative Lipsky may be on certain subjects, especially foreign affairs, his stewardship of the paper has been open and daring. Recently, he ran a column by writer and editor Philip Gourevitch resisting "the notion that American Jewish culture can be understood as a matter of neurosis, cuisine, and television sitcoms":
**{: .break one} ** Sadly, a large portion—I'd venture that it's close to 50%—of the material that comes in to this office for review or publication conceives of Jewishness as something defined from without by persecution or hostility. Sitting in this chair on a bad day, you might think that Jews had finally succumbed to Sartre's insulting suggestion that if people stopped hating us we would cease to exist. . . . Sadder still is the fact that many Jews seem to cherish their self-perception as victims. This is a common idiocy of our age, hardly unique to Jews: to seek one's value in one's devaluation by others. We are hated, so we must be great enough to warrant hatred, the thinking goes, we are a cause, and easy righteousness is on our side. **
Gourevitch's article, which goes on to urge secular Jews to find their identity in learning and the traditions of Jewish culture, is just not the sort of thing you would expect to find in Jewish Week or Hadassah.
Whenever Lipsky is asked why he threw away a big-time career at the Wall Street Journal to edit the English-language Forward, he says, "I did it for the prestige." He told me, "It's true. These are serious thinkers here. The Forward has a Nobel Prize. So they're not terribly impressed with Lipsky. It was just a question of trying to rise to their level."
Visitors to the Forward office, however, notice that while the Yiddish and the English staffs work on the same floor, they hardly mix. (The segregation is social and editorial. Neither paper runs translated articles from the other.) There is a bit of a cultural gulf in their interests. There are no Talmudic scholars on the English side, and, next to some of his staffers, Lipsky is a regular Maimonides. At one meeting, the English staff was talking about Hanukkah, and a reporter could not follow the drift.
"What's a dreidel?" he asked.
Jonathan Rosen, a Yale graduate who has also served as cultural editor and executive editor, told me that, while the two sides come from different worlds, there is tremendous respect not only of the younger for the older but vice versa. The older generation is not the least bit deluded about the future of the Yiddish Forward, and hopes that the publication will go on, at least in English. "The Forward is a little like the State of Israel. It had a history, and now it has a history again," Rosen said. "I'll tell my parents' friends that I work for the Forward and their faces will beam, because they want so much to believe that Yiddish is being reborn. But Yiddish culture was disappearing even before the Holocaust. Shtetl life was changing. Lots of what we call Yiddish culture—films like 'The Dybbuk,' which was made in Poland in the thirties—was already a self-conscious re-creation. Not authentic, already romanticized. What looks to us like authentic old Yiddish culture was already being made in a twilight era."
Rosen went on, "The Yiddish Forward led a generation of American Jews into American life. Now they need to be led back to the sources of their culture. They have been born into ignorance—ignorance, not merely secularism. It's a little like the breakup of the Soviet Union. No one is Soviet anymore. You are Russian, Ukrainian. In the multicultural revolution, the notion of being American is not the same as it was. Jews have to discover that unless they embrace their identity they are not part of the equation. Jews are searching for an affiliation. Sometimes reading a newspaper can be an affiliation." ♦


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Monday, February 14, 2011
Man Candy
Few things in life cause such instinctive satisfaction as bacon. The aroma alone is enough to cause drooling of epic proportion. And, yet, there is more...
And entire industry is growing around bacon: flavored bacon; gourmet bacon; farm fresh bacon.
There are also bacon novelties like soap; bacon adhesive bandages; even bikinis made of actual bacon, which is treat upon treat if you ask me. Lurking in the shadows, however, is one baconized treat that has eluded me, until now: Bacon Candy.
I have heard legends of such a thing, emanating from the deep, secretive southern United States, like the candy you can make by boiling a can of sweeten condensed milk, which sounds a lot like napalm to me so I don't advise it. Armed with the internet and a few different approaches, we made an attempt at Bacon Candy or what we've decided to call MAN CANDY.
Here's the recipe:
one lb of bacon cut into bite size pieces
two cups of brown sugar in a large ziploc bag
one nonstick cookie sheet on top of which is a nonstick rack
brown paper grocery sacks
place the bacon pieces into the bag of brown sugar 2-3 at a time and shake until coated. place on baking rack which is on the cookie sheet and bake on 400 for 25 minutes until crispy. i cannot emphasize enough how important it is that everything be nonstick. or plan to throw it out. seriously. remove and cool on brown paper grocery sacks - any other paper will stick like a bitch, so don't try it. again, totally serious about this. consume within an hour or two.
We had planned to serve Man Candy for Valentine's Day Open House at Styring. Sadly, we cannot make 500 pieces required for open house and serve within an hour or two. Out test of overnight storage was a fail. The candy gets slimy and does not store well. Theoretically, if you leave it uncovered, it may keep overnight, but in a house with the wine dog and a home kitchen, it's just not realistic. Besides, being a dog strong of nose and greedy of stomach, Molly would not get any sleep with all that bacon resting in the kitchen.
Try this at home and let us know how it works for you. I'm tempted to add some cayenne pepper next time to take it to a whole new level. Woof!
5 comments:
wow that looks like it would be tasty nommy and I loves bacon.I could make some an share with my dad.ReplyDelete
Boomie the cat
Wow can't wait to get home and try this.ReplyDelete
Yum! I would eat that and I'm not a man! :)ReplyDelete
Yummy Molly!!! Woof Woof and Bear Hugsssssssss! Am gonna make this - Im drooling at the thought!!! Bear Hugsssssssssssss from Tweetybear :)))))ReplyDelete
- AnonymousMay 27, 2011 at 7:57 PM
still bragging about your recipe to my friends on Facebook :)ReplyDelete
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subset: commoncrawl


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- Parent Category: News
Careful during your morning commute snow, ice on area roads
Most of the snow further to the south, but officials report area roadways are a bit slick this Monday morning. The winter storm system dumped several inches of snow and significant ice accumulations throughout much of Illinois.
The IDOT office at Ottawa reports I-57 is clear with a few scattered slick spots. Rural areas in Iroquois, Ford, Livingston and Kankakee counties have some slick roads. Roads are about 75% bare.
Light snow, some freezing drizzle and cold temperatures will make the morning commute a bit hazardous. The National Weather Service reports varied snow amounts.
Meteorologist James Auten said "With the temperatures not expected to get above freezing until Friday, drivers should be careful, especially early in the week."
Illinois State police reported several accidents along I-57 and I-74. Roads crews throughout Central Illinois were called out early Sunday morning to treat slick spots with salt. No serious injuries were reported as of Sunday night.
Southern Illinois was affected initially with accumulations of freezing rain, followed by a changeover to heavy snow. Snow totals of 8 to 12 inches were common between Interstate 70 and the Ohio River, with the heaviest passing through Mount Vernon to near Lawrenceville.
The forecast calls for cold temperatures today, with a high of 23 degrees, but with wind gusts as high as 23 miles per hour, dropping the wind chill factor to 3 degrees. Temperatures are expected to remain in the middle 20s Tuesday through Thursday. Friday's high is expected to be 33 degrees, but there is no precipitation in the forecast for the remainder of the week.


text: Etihad Airways held its third annual 'Run for a Cause' event on the Abu Dhabi Corniche on Friday, 17 April 2015, raising almost half a million dirhams for charity. The event was attended by Sheikh Ahmed bin Nasser Al Nahyan who awarded medals and prizes to the race category winners. All funds raised will go to two special needs centres in Fujairah and Al Wagan in the UAE, and the renovation of a school in Kakamega, Kenya. The charity event commenced with the playing of the UAE national anthem by the Abu Dhabi Police Band. It also featured games, live entertainment, face painting, an elite motorbike parade, and a range of prizes for fast finishers, including Etihad Airways' Economy Class return tickets, and safari packages to Sri Lanka from Etihad Holidays. More than 4,500 participants gathered to run the adult three kilometre race along the Corniche course, while children ran for 1.5 kilometres and runners with special needs also took part. Khaled Al Mehairbi, Etihad Airways' Senior Vice President of Government and Aero Political Affairs, said: "As the UAE flag carrier, we are at the heart of the community, and we feel strongly about giving back to those in need." Mr Al Mehairbi, who also serves as the Chairman of Etihad Airways' Sports and Social Committee, added: "This donation represents the kindness and generosity of our staff and partners, as well as the wider community in Abu Dhabi who participated in this charity initiative." The community event, which was open to UAE schools, organisations and residents of all ages, is part of Etihad Airways' strategy to promote global education, access to learning and the wellbeing of children, both in the UAE and beyond. More than 1,000 members of Abu Dhabi Police took part in the fun run. The force was instrumental in organising the race, offering facilities to support the event and spread awareness among the local community. The fun run was held in collaboration with Abu Dhabi Police, the Emirates Red Crescent, Department of Transport, Ministry of Interior, Abu Dhabi Sports Council, Abu Dhabi City Municipality, EuroGulf, Abu Dhabi Educational Council, Abu Dhabi Media Company, Zayed Higher Organization for Humanitarian Care and Special Needs, Al Ain Water, Arwa Mineral Water, Mikura Pearls, Yas Waterworld, Ferrari World Abu Dhabi, Al Salem Trading Enterprises and Sport 360 newspaper. Hotels, restaurants and medical centres also supported the charity initiative, including Abu Dhabi Royal Hotel, Hilton Hotel Abu Dhabi, Shangri-La Hotel Abu Dhabi, Novotel ,St Regis Hotel Abu Dhabi, Al Raha Beach Hotel, Azzurro Italian restaurant, Al Jaber Optical, Dar Al Fajr Medical Institute, Corpofino Spa & Slimming Lounge, Al Borj Medical Laboratories, Fusion Art and Al Khaja Enterprises. "We hope that by bringing people together like this, we will help raise awareness and vital funds for a very deserving cause, and put a smile on the faces of children worldwide," Mr Al Mehairbi concluded. Entre em contato conosco Como uma empresa aérea verdadeiramente internacional, temos uma presença realmente global. Descubra como contatar sua loja Etihad mais próxima. Visualize informações de contato Feedback Se quiser nos mandar um comentário, elogio ou reclamação, ou simplesmente fazer uma pergunta, favor clicar aqui Curtir Visite nossa página no Facebook! Assista nossos vídeos Visite nosso canal no YouTube! Siga-nos Etihad Airways | Ofertas Etihad | Ajuda Etihad | Recompensas Etihad


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Supporting Women Farmers: Strategies for Engaging Women in Agricultural Development
June 11, 2013
A new technical brief from the International Center for Research on Women highlights TechnoServe's Coffee Initiative and its effective approaches to cultivating women's participation.
Gender norms and attitudes often can stand in the way of women farmers reaching their full potential. In Mbeya, Tanzania, where coffee – an important cash crop – is traditionally perceived as a "man's crop," many women do not benefit financially from their contribution to their households' coffee production. A new brief released by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) spotlights the work that TechnoServe's Coffee Initiative is carrying out in this region to address gender issues and ensure that women farmers participate in and benefit from the program's agronomy training.
The report examines five approaches used in the Coffee Initiative and a second agricultural program in the region, Faida Mali's Soil Health Project:
- Setting a gender goal: TechnoServe has established an objective of 30 percent participation, for both farmers trained and the field staff delivering the training.
- Communicating gender-related intentions from day 1: TechnoServe strives to be clear and consistent in terms of gender messaging well before the first training is conducted.
- Acting as a role model for women's participation and equality: TechnoServe ensures that women are represented in key positions, particularly as farmer trainers, where they serve as role models to women farmers and demonstrate that women can be experts in traditionally male-dominated fields.
- Incorporating women's (and men's) perspectives into project design: TechnoServe conducts interviews and focus group discussions to collect information about gender-related perspectives that help shape programming.
- Using communications and training approaches that facilitate women's engagement: TechnoServe farmer trainers conduct home visits both before and after trainings to remind women to participate and to see how well farmers are applying the new skills and knowledge.
Read ICRW's full technical brief and learn more about the Coffee Initiative, implemented with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Related Blog Posts
Cultivating the Next Generation of Coffee Farmers
Nestled in the heart of Zimbabwe's Honde Valley, a small coffee nursery holds the key to prosperity for a group of young coffee farmers.
A Mission That Resonates: TechnoServe's Global Advisory Council
Caroline Lundberg has been a member of the Global Advisory Council since 2010. In this Q&A, she shares how she got involved, why she supports TechnoServe, and how seeing the organization's work firsthand changed her perceptions of development.
Can Drones Change Africa's Agricultural Future?
In sub-Saharan Africa, TechnoServe is testing sustainable, cost-effective, and measurable innovations for development. A surprising potential win for smallholders: drone technology.


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A Wigan teen died from a perforated stomach six days after a scan identified the hernia that likely caused it, an inquest heard.
Sean Akdemir was 16 when he collapsed at home on December 16, 2014, and was rushed to hospital where he died a short time later, an inquest at Bolton Coroner's' Court heard.
I would like to know how the report from the CT was prepared and who it was sent to and why Sean was not recalled to hospital when the problems first happenedMaureen Akdemir
The Springfield student had been suffering five months of abdominal pain after an operation to fix a diaphragm abnormality.
He was found to have an eventrated diaphragm meaning the left side of it sat above the right and reduced his lung capacity on that side by 20 per cent.
In a statement read to the court by senior coroner Jennifer Leeming, Sean's mum Maureen said that in June 2013 Sean had hurt his back in the gym and was referred to Alder Hey Children's Hospital.
She said: "He was examined and sent for an X-ray and the results showed there was something wrong with Sean's diaphragm.
"The doctor decided it was best to deal with that first before sorting his back."
Sean was referred to Dr Matthew Jones, an Alder Hey consultant paediatric surgeon and attended an appointment with him in March 2014.
The decision was made to operate on the muscular partition in a bid to improve his lung capacity but Sean, who was studying for his A-levels at John Rigby, decided to wait until the holidays so he didn't miss any studies.
Mrs Akdemir said: "After the operation, Sean had pain in his stomach and heartburn. He was bent over in bed in pain. We discussed it with the doctors but they put it down to postoperative recovery.
"At home, Sean continued to have pain in his stomach and had problems going to the toilet. He had a follow up six weeks after the operation with Mr Jones."
Despite repeated visits to his GP and Alder Hey and a trip to Wigan Infirmary A&E, no-one could explain what was causing the pain.
He underwent a CT scan on December 10 but the following weekend Sean began vomiting.
Mrs Akdemir took him to see GP Dr Liam Hosie who prescribed anti-sickness medication to try to get Sean's symptoms under control.
But he continued to feel ill and collapsed in the early hours of the following morning.
Dr Hosie told the court that when he had seen Sean he had not yet received the results of the CT scan which the court heard showed Sean had a hernia on his diaphragm.
But he said: "I cannot honestly say if I had seen the results I would have acted differently. This is a highly unusual and complex case."
He also said he was aware that Sean had an appointment at Alder Hey on December 19 to review the results of the scan and believed Sean had a sickness bug.
Consultant paediatric histopathologist Melanie Newbould, who carried out an autopsy on Sean, said he died from a hemopneumothorax - blood and air in the chest cavity - as a result of the diaphragm hernia which had led to his stomach's perforating.
She said it was likely caused by the abnormality in his diaphragm and the surgery may have contributed by further weakening it.
Mrs Akdemir said: "Sean was my life and my angel. He was such a wonderful boy and had the kindest heart.
"He was passionate about sport and an avid Wigan Warriors supporter. He had lots of friends and he will be missed by all who knew him.
"I have a number of concerns I would like to raise, like whether the problem with his diaphragm had been identified when he was a child and if so why it wasn't operated on when he was younger.
"I want to know whether he could have lived his life without the operation and I would like to know why Mr Jones thought he could carry out the operation even though he was used to operating on small children.
"I would like to know why nothing was done to help Sean following the results of the CT scan even though the hernia was identified on December 10.
"When did Mr Jones learn the results of the CT? Why was there not better communication between staff?
"I would like to know how the report from the CT was prepared and who it was sent to and why Sean was not recalled to hospital when the problems first happened."


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Inspired by Lemon Twist from designer Ellen Maxwell
Quilt tester: Jan Ragaller
2—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted green prints (blocks)
4—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted red prints (blocks)
2—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted gray prints (blocks)
2—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted light blue prints (blocks)
3—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted dark blue prints (blocks)
3—1⁄8-yard pieces assorted white prints (blocks)
1⁄4 yard dark blue flag print (sashing)
3⁄8 yard dark blue dot (binding)
1 yard backing fabric
17x49" batting
Finished table runner: 10-3⁄8x43"
Yardages and cutting instructions are based on 42" of usable fabric width.
Measurements include 1⁄4" seam allowances. Sew with right sides together unless otherwise stated.


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Well, my harp learning started to come on apace a while ago, so of course, I went right out and bought a keyboard which practically killed it off right away.
But anyway, possessing as I do no musical knowledge (some say talent) whatsoever, I got a couple of beginners' books but never quite got comfortable with them - partly as I have no inclination to play the likes of Row Your Boat and assorted Abba crap.
So a month or two ago I got hold of that David Barret Cohen DVD - Improvising Blues Piano 1, I think its called - and it really blew me away. Starts you off with a typical 12 bar shuffle - with the right hand pretty much echoing what the left's doing - and I've more or less got two variations on that nailed down. Am absolutely delighted - never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to play anything like that - I could die tomorrow a happy man.
But here, finally, is the question - I've tried to move on to the next right-hand riff, which is 'divorced' from the left hand rhythm, and I'm really having trouble keeping such a simple bass line (C&G, C&G, C&A, C&A, C&G, C&G etc) on track while I'm doing something totally different with the right hand. It's the old rubbing stomach/patting head conundrum, so has anyone got any tips on how to keep the rhythm going? Apart from practice, practice, practice?
I need a good sign-off line.


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William F. Condee
Photo courtesy of: University Communications and Marketing
Mar 7, 2012
By Kyle Ranally
Ohio University Professor of Theater William F. Condee was selected for a Fulbright Specialists project in Germany at the University of Leipzig.
Condee was appointed to this program by the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. For more than 60 years, the Fulbright Program has sent thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals abroad to teach and conduct research. This international educational exchange activity selects its participants on the basis of academic or professional achievement.
Condee is a distinguished educator in the areas of humanities and interdisciplinary arts. He has authored two books, "Coal and Culture: The Opera House in Appalachia" and "Theatrical Space: A Guide for Directors and Designers."
Prior to coming to Ohio University, he had taught at the University of Leipzig, University of Wales and Vassar (N.Y.) College. He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards in education including the Presidential Teacher Award, Class of 1950 Faculty Excellence Award, College of Fine Arts Outstanding Senior Teacher Award, Honors Tutorial College Outstanding Tutor Award, and the Excellence in Education Award from Ohio Magazine.
Condee took some time to speak about this appointment with Compass:
What are you teaching and how will this experience benefit you and your students?
I will have the opportunity to work with University of Leipzig students and faculty on the problematic legacy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and issues of race theory. I will also be able to work with German secondary school teachers, through the U.S. Consulate, along the lines of what we do at the Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities at Ohio University.
The goal here is to encourage intellectual stimulation and lively discussion, rather than pedagogical instruction (German teachers, like their American counterparts, already get plenty of that). This experience will provide me with an international perspective on race and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Germans have always been interested in the novel (There is an Onkel Toms Hütte subway station in Berlin), and people are especially interested in the current election cycle. Germany has its own problematic history regarding race, and I hope to learn more about how American race theories have been received and influenced events here.
What are you most excited about?
I am excited about working with the great scholars at the American Studies Institute here. In addition, the libraries here are among the most comprehensive in Germany, and I am excited to extend my research here. Just yesterday, I discovered a photograph of a mid-nineteenth century drawing of Onkel Toms Hütte that a student made on a wall while he was held in the student jail.
Why did you choose University of Leipzig?
This is my sixth time teaching in Leipzig, going back almost 20 years, and I have led study-abroad programs for OHIO students several times. Ohio University has a long and fruitful relationship with the University of Leipzig, with exchange of students and faculty. I knew this would be a productive place to work, teach and build on great relationships that Ohio University has already established. Also my family loves it here.
How long will you be over there?
I arrived here Feb. 5 and will be here through June 6.
What do you hope to accomplish in Germany?
I hope to share what I know with students, teachers and professors here, and to broaden my horizons about race in America from an international perspective. Ultimately, I hope to gain funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for an institute at Ohio University on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and race in America.
What do you like about Germany?
The music and the food. Bach lived and wrote here, and it is thrilling to hear his music in his actual church. The Gewandhaus Orchestra is among the best in the world, and the tickets are quite affordable. Germany actually values the arts and provides generous government funding. The theater is also very exciting here—you always love it or hate it, but the choices are so radical that one can never be neutral.
The food — the pastry! The sausage! I have put on five pounds already, and I don't want to think about my cholesterol. I hope to run the Leipzig Half Marathon in April, and so maybe the running will burn off the fat.
Any final thoughts?
This support from Fulbright and the sabbatical from Ohio University are providing just what I hoped for -- a chance to reflect, to share and to learn.


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CASSETTE: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape.
SPIN showing love here!
Hypebeast write-up!
Great shout-out from Sundance here!
Awesome write-up in Better Taste Than Sorry!
Our first write-up here! Thanks EVR!
--- Our Last Day of Fundraising! ---
We're almost there gang! To say thanks for all of your generous pledges, Seth and I will be rewarding one lucky backer, chosen at random, with the amazing handmade sterling silver cassette necklace you see here, lovingly donated by KT McK!
A few months ago, the term cassette tape was taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary.
It may seem ironic, then, that the cassette has experienced a quiet comeback over the last few years, as independent labels issuing tape-only releases have begun popping up around the world.
What better excuse to take a look back at this beloved musical format?
As recorded sound continues its love affair with the downloadable, ethereal digital file, the tangible artefact is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Help us celebrate the A Side, the B Side, the mixtape, and the whole of cassette culture by supporting Cassette: A Documentary. We'll look at all parts of popular culture influenced by the cassette, including hip-hop and B-Boy culture, indie rock, home recording, and beyond.
We've already conducted a number of interviews in the UK, and with your support we'll be able to speak to manufacturers, musicians, and historians around the world. Along the way, we'll stop in Zimbabwe to cover the recent boom in cassette culture there.
Please support if you can, and visit cassettemovie.com for updates! Thanks!
Extra Special thanks to Damien Jurado, David Bazan, and The Crocodiles for helping out on this project!
Want to learn more about the cassette tape comeback? Here are a few interesting links:
Huffington Post:
And here's a TDK interview of Nas that we love:
Funding period
- (59 days)


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Moose Lake-Willow River defeats Cromwell
The Moose Lake-Willow River boys basketball team defeated the Cromwell Cardinals 66-40 to go to 3-0 on the season in Moose Lake on Friday, December 14. The Rebels were led by Tony Adamczak's 22 points, including three three-pointers. Adamczak's hustle also netted him 11 re- bounds for a double-double. The much-taller corps of Rebels boarders beat Cromwell on the rebounds by 33-18 for the game. The score at halftime was just 31-23.
Moose Lake-Willow River went on to put three players in double figures as Jake Disterhaupt and John Zinter contributed 10 points each, with Zinter just missing a double-double with eight boards. Cromwell was paced by Josh Oliver's nine points and four rebounds.
The Rebels did not have all that much success as a team from three-point land as Adamczak sank one of two three-pointers in the first half and 2-for-5 in the second half as ML-WR was 1-for-4 (25 percent) from threeland in the first half and 2-for-11 in the second half to finish at just 3-for-14 (21 percent) for the game from outside the arc.
Cromwell went 0-for-4 in the first half from downtown and improved to 2-for-7 in the second to end up with only 2-for-11 (18 percent) from threeland for the game.
Most of Moose Lake-Willow River's success came via the game in the paint as the tall Rebels took advantage for a very good 13-24 (54 percent) in the first half and came through with an almost as strong 14-for-27 (52 percent) in the second to wind up with a very solid 27-for-51 (53 percent) in and near the paint.
The Cardinals struggled at 8-for-29 (40 percent) and fell to 4-for-15 (27 percent) in the second half to finish at a rough 12-for-35 (34 percent) on their inside game.
Combining the threes and the twos, ML-WR ended up at a total field rate of 30-for-65 (44 percent) while Cromwell shot a combined 14-for-46 (30 percent) from the field for the game.
Cromwell did have a strength at the foul line as they sank a very good 10-for-14 (1 percent) of their tosses, while the Rebels had a hard time at the line with a meager 3-for-12 (25 percent) from the charity stripe for the game.
Moose Lake-Willow River hit the boards to block out and grab and to out-rebound the Cardinals 15-8 in the first half and kept clutching the caroms in the second half for a difference of 18-10 off the glass to end up out-rebounding Cromwell by a large margin of 33-18 for the game.
On the steals, it was only 5-4 in ML-WR's favor in the first half, but the Rebels stepped it up to change that stat rather dramatically at 8-1 in the second half to end up ahead 13-5 in the theft department for the game.
The Rebels and the Cardinals exchanged for clean assists in the first half at 4-4, but Moose Lake-Willow River claimed six readily apparent feeds in the second half to just two notable assists for Cromwell in the second half to complete the night with 10-5 on the notable scoring plays.
The Rebels had some troubles taking care of the basketball in the first half as they committed eight turnovers, but cut that down to only five lost possessions in the second half to wind up with a baker's dozen mistakes. Cromwell was also able to do a decent job in the first half with just one more miscue at nine, but with 16 lost possessions they had a rough second half and finished the game with one more than two dozen costly lost possessions to end the game with a tough 25 turnovers.
Next, the Rebels travel to Crosby-Ironton High School to take part in the Crosby-Ironton Invitational December 27-29.


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Introducing UCS Central: Unified Computing at Global Scale
If your motto is "go big or go home" then you're probably going to like UCS Central. Since inception, Cisco's Unified Computing System has upheld some important core tenets in its design ethos: management via policy, simple scaling and open infrastructure programmability. UCS Central, a new management product in the UCS family, extends all of those principles to a level of scale and granular administrative reach that are truly unprecedented in our industry. The Data Center team at Cisco is very excited about what UCS Central is going to mean for our customers, so on November 8th we're hosting an online event to lay out the whole story. I hope you will join us.
UCS Central is essentially a manager of managers. Consider a single domain of UCS to be a pair of Fabric Interconnects where an instance of UCS Manager resides and looks after the goings on of up to 160 servers and all of their I/O connectivity. UCS Central now allows administrators to manage multiple domains of UCS and scale their aggregate environment to the range of 10,000 servers.
You might say that UCS customers can opt for the "go big" option. I suppose since this the golden age of mobility, they can access it all remotely to go big and go home…
UCS Central was developed with direct input from our many customers who are deploying multiple domains of UCS within and across their data centers. They want to take the dynamic administrative power of UCS to the next logical level of scale. Similarly, the last three years has seen a fantastic adoption of the "programmable infrastructure" capabilities of the UCS system by leading systems management ISVs. That trend is just going bigger with UCS Central, which is based on the same data model and API structure as UCS Manager. Innovative implementations from Cloupia, Compuware, Science Logic, Splunk and Zenoss are already on the way. Cisco's Intelligent Automation for Cloud naturally takes full advantage of UCS programmability, and today also marks a new release there.
There are a couple of key references I recommend you take a look at to understand the full capability and scope of UCS Central. One is this page where we've posted all the material you need to get a close up view of the product. Even better is this episode of TechWise TV devoted to UCS Central where Brian Schwarz and Roger Andersson (two of the brilliant minds behind UCS) give a great overview and demo.
In a nutshell: UCS Central enables global management of many Cisco UCS domains, making staff more efficient and effective. It gives administrators a high-level view and management of all their UCS domains and the ability to logically group domains for ease of control.
● Centralized Inventory of all Cisco UCS components for a definitive view of the entire infrastructure and simplified integration with current Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes
● Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand
● Global ID pooling to eliminate identifier conflicts
● Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of the Cisco UCS domains
● An XML API, building on the Cisco UCS Manager XML API for easy integration into higher-level data center management frameworks
Be sure to join us for the webcast to learn more about UCS Central and some exciting features in the upcoming release of UCS Manager 2.1 that will be posted here later in the month.
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Eric is a panelologist (a studier of comics) and a dealer in comic book original art.
In 2003, Mr. Roberts assumed the SF SPCA board seat of his mother, the late Leanne B. Roberts. As a Board Member, his primary focus is the Leanne B. Roberts Animal Care Center, and he is also involved in the Feral Cat Assistance Program.
Mr. Roberts graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a BA in Economics and Philosophy, and has an MBA from Stanford University. Mr. Roberts is guardian to two cats and two French Bulldogs. He also feeds three feral cats that come by his house each night.


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fat decimator system
fat decimator system review
best new years resolution diet
my full review of the fat decimator system by Kyle Cooper, the best selling weight loss plan of 2018, is a easy to follow step by step system that will show you both a diet and workout that will help you lose a ton of weight over the next 28 days. Click the video in the description for a full product run down. I am one of the few people in this industry that will actually run through the products to make sure that you are finding only the best products for your own personal journey.


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I've previously mentioned that LLVM doesn't support zero-overhead garbage collection. Big deal. It's about the same as saying LLVM doesn't answer whether P=NP. I apparently failed in conveying that this is an unsolved problem in computer science.
Solving this problem isn't as simple as putting heap pointers in registers (although it is required). The real beef lies in determining which registers are heap pointers when it isn't known statically. Determining at run-time which registers are heap pointers is intimately tied to the data model of the high-level language. Doing this well in an agnostic way is an unsolved problem. (Note that pointer tagging is generally avoided).
Several people apparently took it personally when I mentioned writing yet another NCG. Let it be clear that I'd never rewrite any of LLVM nor wish to belittle the effort it takes to write a general compiler. I was merely talking about writing a non-optimizing translator from an extremely limited IR to machine code.
- LLVM is great. I do not wish to criticise any part of it.
- What you guys have created is impressive. I do not wish to belittle your efforts.
- LLVM is not a silver bullet. It does not solve all open questions in the academic world and no one expects it to.


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2007 Americruise Come Join Us Out On The Road
Just in case you haven't already heard or read about it in the magazine, Rod & Custom will be heading back to the Nebraska State Fair Park in Lincoln, Nebraska, the weekend of June 29 to July 1 for the 2007 Americruise, and CLASSIC TRUCKS will be joining the show as well!.
During the event, we'll once again have driving activities that'll keep you entertained. The first driving event will be an autocross course set up with cones in the parking lot. Each driver will be timed on every lap through the course, and not surprisingly, the fastest time wins bragging rights and a trophy. If it's anything like last year, it'll be as much fun for the spectators as the drivers, as we're sure there will be plenty of tire smoke and wild action.
The opportunity to test your car or truck's acceleration and braking will be available during the Go & Whoa contest. Your reaction time will be important as you accelerate in a straight line (we hope) and brake just in time to stop within a preset area marked with two lines. The vehicle and driver who can do this in the quickest time wins. Smoking the tires right up until you have to slam on the brakes is optional, but it will bring the most response from the crowd.
If participating in these two events sounds like something you need to do, your truck must have seatbelts and go through a quick inspection to make sure it has stuff like working brakes and throttle return springs. If you have a roadster or convertible and you want to participate, you'll need to bring a helmet (you know how insurance companies get).
As for the tours driving to the event, we're trying to get four legs heading toward Lincoln, which will start sometime around June 23, depending on the distance needed to travel. Details are still coming together, so check back here to get the latest. As of right now, we have Painless Performance Products signed on to lead a tour out of Fort Worth, Texas. We're still planning the route, but the start date looks to be Wednesday, June 27.
The West Coast tour has been getting some discussion around the office, but nothing is nailed down just yet, although some of the staff will most likely be leaving from Southern California and possibly heading north to take a different route than last year.
An East Coast tour is being kicked around also, so don't feel left out just yet. Stay tuned right here, or keep an eye on Rod & Custom's Web site, www.rodandcustommagazine.com, for more details as they become available.
We're looking forward to another great cruise across the country and winding up back in Lincoln. Hope you can come along!
Truck of the Year Awards
When we decided to hand out a Truck of the Year Award at last year's event, we knew we wanted the winners to have to earn it. This year we've expanded it to two categories: Truck of the Year Early (sponsored by CLASSIC TRUCKS) and Truck of the Year Late (sponsored by Custom Classic Trucks). Truck of the Year Early is open to pre-'48 Ford and pre-'47 Chevy (the same era for Dodge and other makes) trucks; the Late category is post-'47.
Entrants who want to participate will need to be at the Americruise on Friday by noon and will be parked in a specified area. The R&C staff will select the Top Five in each class based on the following judged categories:- Exterior Design
– Fit and Finish
– Interior
– Engine Compartment
– Undercarriage
Once the Top Fives have been selected, it'll start getting interesting. They willeach be run through a safety inspection, and then they will make some timed runs through the autocross course, do a 0-40-mph acceleration test and a 40-0-mph brake test on Saturday. The best vehicle in each event will be awarded 100 points, and the rest will be awarded a percentage of points based on how close they were to the best time. On Saturday night, these 10 cars will be required to participate in a cruise (Reliability Test) to somewhere in Lincoln. The cruise will be pass or fail-if you make it, you get 100 points, if not, you get none. Sound fair? Hope so!


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The product that I was most excited to play with from the YSL collection was the Creme De Blush. The first three colours have been launched before, three ready to wear shades (Velvet Peach, Powder Rose and Silky Praline) and two catwalk shades called Passion Red and Temptation Fuchsia which are BRIGHT.
They say:
Yves Saint Laurent plays with color in a collection of cream blushes that sculpt and highlight the cheekbones in an "ultra-natural" way.
On contact with the skin, the creamy texture turns into a light powdery film.
Velvety soft, light and airy, its exceptionally smooth texture blends perfectly and the color adapts like a "second skin".
The packaging is like all YSL, in shiny gold and luxurious. I chose two chased, Velvet Peach for every day and Temptation Fuchsia just because it looked like so much fun:
Here are the colours. Both of these are gorgeous colours – I love peaches anyway and this is a warm orange coral brown type shade. Fuchsia Temptation is part of the Spring 2011 'look', Bohemian Chic and looks so much fun.
The texture of these is firm – NOT HARD – just not oily or waxy in anyway. It got more of a siliconey feel to it and has just the right amount of pigmentation.
I absolutely love love love love love Fuchsia Temptation. It is absolutely hot florescent pink it's so bright:
But on the skin it's just RIGHT. It's not horridly bright and scary at on, it's pretty and brightens the face (it's not exactly powder pink either, it has the right amount of kick).
Swatches of a small amount of product:
Once it sets, it stays all day, I find cream blushers disappear on me but this lasted all day as a bit of a stain.
These are fab but if you can only grab one, it must be Fuchsia!
These are £28 each.


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Rogers' perseverance learned on open sea
PHOENIX -- Craig Rogers had a bad day on the water last week. A storm brewed off the coast of Maine, so the 54-year-old spent a harrowing day hauling 300 lobster traps to greater depths, rather than allowing the Atlantic Ocean to churn them into balls of wire.
"The next time I haul, it will be what we call a 'broker,'" said Rogers, a fourth-generation lobsterman. "It will be a long day of work for nothing.
PHOENIX -- Craig Rogers had a bad day on the water last week. A storm brewed off the coast of Maine, so the 54-year-old spent a harrowing day hauling 300 lobster traps to greater depths, rather than allowing the Atlantic Ocean to churn them into balls of wire.
"The next time I haul, it will be what we call a 'broker,'" said Rogers, a fourth-generation lobsterman. "It will be a long day of work for nothing.
"Literally, nothing."
A few days later, his 26-year-old son Mark had a bad day on the mound. Mark Rogers lasted only four outs against the Rangers and topped out at 89 mph on the stadium radar gun. He has 10 walks and one strikeout in six Cactus League innings so far. Mark Rogers' bid for a spot in the Brewers' Opening Day rotation is not going well.
"I've been putting in the work," he said. "I've just got to continue to work through it."
Somehow, Mark Rogers failed to inherit his dad's New England accent. But Mark did inherit the work ethic of a man who rises at 4 a.m. six days a week, stops for coffee with his fellow fishermen, loads up with bait and fuel and departs Maine's picturesque Mackerel Cove for the open ocean.
Mark was working by the time he was 6 or 7 years old. When he was 11, Mark and older brother Brett inherited their grandfather's rowboat and began lobstering on their own. They earned enough to buy an outboard motor, and the two brothers built a small business that provided spending money through high school.
"My mother [Stephanie] had to come with us in the beginning to make sure we didn't kill each other," Mark said. "Slowly, it turned into just him and I going together. That was a lot more fun."
Said Craig Rogers: "He was always trying to do a little bit more than he was able to do at his age. I had a lot of fun with him."
It was also work -- hard work. Mark Rogers described in great detail the lobster traps his dad uses to fish off the coast, the laws governing the number of traps each fisherman can haul and the current per-pound prices of lobster.
"It's a lot of hard work, and a lot of patience, too," Mark said. "One thing about lobstering is you're self-made, and you get as much out of it as you put in. Very few people are out there now hauling. The weather is lousy, you have to pick your days and you really have to really know a lot about what you're doing to catch anything at this time of year. My dad is very diligent with his memory of where lobsters have been, the lobster patterns and where they move to, water temperatures."
Yet Mark Rogers watched his dad work year-round. His uncles, too. Craig Rogers' brothers operate out of the same cove.
There are good days and bad days. One day recently, Craig Rogers pocketed $26 in profit, Mark said.
"I don't want to pat ourselves on the back out here, but it's a hard life," Craig Rogers said. "It's not like packing your lunch and going to the [office]. There are days you get kicked around, and some days you're just glad to get home."
Which brings us back to baseball. Mark regularly served as one of dad's first mates until 2004, when Milwaukee made him a first-round Draft pick and he began a baseball career that has included more than a few "brokers." There was a shoulder surgery early in his career and two full seasons lost to rehab. There was a promising four-game Major League debut in 2010, followed by more surgery in 2011 for carpal tunnel syndrome. Every day, Mark Rogers would call home, dad says, with a positive spin on his progress.
In 2012, Mark's seas calmed. He made 18 healthy starts at Triple-A Nashville, followed by seven starts for the Brewers. Rogers' fastball averaged 93.6 mph and he had a 3.92 big league ERA when the organization decided he had thrown enough innings. Rogers reluctantly shut down and focused ahead to 2013, when he would report to camp out of Minor League options, with a strong chance to win a job in Milwaukee's pitching rotation.
"I know how bad he wants it," Craig Rogers said. "I've watched him. I don't think the people understand, and I didn't until I saw him go through it, how worked up he is about making the team this year. He wants to be a starter."
Father and son talked about that wish at Thanksgiving, when Mark went home to Maine and spent a day working with his dad and younger brother Scott, 22, who is studying business at the University of Southern Maine and considering carrying on the family business. Mark admits he was out of practice. But when he returned to his new home in Chandler, Ariz., Mark rediscovered what he was good at. He began rising early and driving to Maryvale Baseball Park for workouts and throwing sessions.
Craig actually worried his son was working too hard, and told him so.
"If you think about it, at this point, he's already more than two months into this," Craig Rogers said.
All of that early work could explain why Mark is missing the usual zip on his fastball. After Tuesday's tough loss to the Rangers, Rogers' next step is unclear. Manager Ron Roenicke would not commit to Rogers' immediate plan on Wednesday, saying only, "We're still trying to figure out some things." Roenicke said he could not elaborate.
But Rogers said the bullpen session before his last start was excellent, and he predicted the work would translate into his next outing -- which he hopes is a start. For now, the Brewers only have probable pitchers listed through Saturday. Sunday would be Rogers' usual day to pitch.
If he does indeed pitch that day, Rogers would have some fans in the stands. Craig and Stephanie Rogers arrived in Phoenix on Tuesday night and attended Wednesday's night game with Mark, his wife Kerrie and their young daughter, Ellyette.
"I know my dad is my biggest fan," Rogers said. "He's been there through the surgeries, the rehabs, all of the junk I've been through. I feel like we kind of went through it together."
Adam McCalvy is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Brew Beat, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamMcCalvy.


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How fast can you go in a standing mile? Well if your name is Bill Warner, you can reach 278.6 MPH from a standing stop in a mile's distance, and then slowdown in another half-mile of run-off. Helping Warner achieve that impressive feat is a turbocharged 1299cc Suzuki Hayabusa that makes 650hp, which Warner methodically turned the screws on until he beat the previous record at the Texas Mile of 261.5 MPH.
A tropical fish farmer and marine biologist by day, Warner is no fish out of water when it comes to going fast (we apologize for that horrible pun), setting the track records this year at the Maxton, North Carolina (272 mph), Loring, Maine (273 mph) and now Goliad, Texas (278.6 mph). If you think firing a bike off down a straight track is just a matter of twisting the throttle and holding on, we suggest you read Warner's account of his time at Texas Mile after the jump.


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UPDATE: Just confirmed by the Trail Blazers that Greg Oden will miss the 2007-2008 season after having micro fracture surgery. From the press release:
"Greg had an arthroscopy and a micro fracture surgery today," said team physician Dr. Don Roberts, who preformed the surgery. "He was found to have articular cartilage damage in his right knee. The area of injury was not large and we were able to treat it with micro fracture, which stimulates the growth of cartilage. There are things about this that are positive for Greg.
First of all he is young. The area where the damage was is small and the rest of his knee looked normal. All those are good signs for a complete recovery from micro fracture surgery."
Oden is expected to be on crutches for up to eight weeks. Recovery time from micro fracture surgery varies from person to person, but generally takes between six and 12 months for full recovery.
"Certainly this is a setback, but our future is still incredibly bright," said Trail Blazers General Manager Kevin Pritchard. "Is it disappointing? Yes. However, this is a great core of talent and players of strong character and will continue to be."
Oden, the #1 pick in June1s NBA Draft, averaged 15.7 points and 9.6 rebounds for Ohio State last season, leading the Buckeyes to the NCAA national championship game as a freshman.
"We know this discouraging news for all of our fans, however, the people of Portland are very enthusiastic and compassionate about their Trail Blazers and I know they will stand behind Greg and the team during his recovery," said Trail Blazers President Larry Miller. "We believe our fans and sponsors are going to continue to support us because they know we1re headed in the right direction."
The Blazers are holding a press conference at 1:30 p.m., and I'll be there to collect audio, which of course I'll post right here in the blog.
Yahoo! Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski is reporting that Greg Oden will be out for the season.
More to come.


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Column | Colleges need better ways to evaluate courses
Should Yale University have shut down a website allowing users to compare student evaluations of the university's courses?
Of course not. The students should have the right to receive that information, and they were rightly scandalized when the site was blocked. But the evaluations themselves don't say very much about educational quality. Indeed, nobody really knows how well professors teach — or how much their students learn — in college. And that might be the biggest scandal of all.
The controversy at Yale began after two students made it easier to access the numerical evaluations of courses. These data were already available through Yale's official course-selection site. But the students' tool made it much simpler to compare the ratings for each course — and each professor.
That's what led administrators to shut down the site this month. It would encourage students to select courses based solely on raw scores, officials said, rather than on the more nuanced student comments that are also collected in the evaluation process. And helping students choose courses wasn't the real goal of that process, anyhow. Yale collects student evaluations "as a way of helping faculty members improve their teaching," one administrator wrote, "not as a course selection tool."
That would be fine if student evaluations illustrated teaching effectiveness and the areas where professors needed to get better. But they don't. In fact, some evidence suggests that professors who receive high evaluations are actually worse teachers than their peers.
In a 2010 study at the Air Force Academy, where a standardized curriculum allows for convenient natural experiments, professors who got high marks from students tended to give out higher grades — and their students did worse in subsequent classes. For the more demanding professors, it was the opposite: They generally got lower student evaluations, but their students did better later on.
In other words, professors with lower expectations got rewarded, even though their students didn't learn as much. The professors who assigned more work taught their students more, but they were punished for doing so.
So should anyone be surprised that students' grades keep rising? About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A's, up from 31 percent in 1988 and 15 percent in 1960, a 2011 study found. Over roughly the same span, the average amount of studying by people enrolled in college declined almost 50 percent, a 2011 study found, from 25 hours per week to 13 hours.
To be fair, student evaluations aren't the only reason for grade inflation and decreased academic workloads. But they're certainly part of the problem. Faculty know that the best route to a positive evaluation is giving an easy A. And students know that they're more likely to succeed in the highly rated classes.
If teachers really cared about what students were learning, we'd devise systems to measure that — and our own instruction — more carefully. Some institutions have started to do this. In 2010, 71 college and university presidents signed an agreement pledging to expand their student assessments. At some schools, students submit examples from their coursework for evaluation; at others, they take tests designed to gauge how much they have learned.
But lots of schools are resisting. At New York University, where I work, there is still no sustained or comprehensive effort to determine what students learn at our home campus or a dozen overseas sites. I've been fortunate to teach at several of them, and I like to think that I've done it well. But I really don't know, and neither does anybody else.
Back at Yale, the students who devised the new website have become a cause celebre in the blogosphere. Ditto for a third Yale student, who wrote a program that posted the university's numerical course evaluations in a way that the school couldn't block.
The administration eventually backed down, admitting that it "erred in trying to compel students to (use) the complete course evaluations" instead of just the numbers.
"In the end," one official wrote, "students can and will decide for themselves how much effort to invest in selecting their courses."
That's true. But in the end, the administration and faculty — not the students — will decide how much effort to invest in discovering how well we teach and how much they learn. Yale officials were wrong to shut down the students' website, but they were right to question student evaluations as a measure of course quality. The big question is whether we can come up with a better measure and whether we care enough to do so.