On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court announced that it would hear a case on affirmative action in university admissions. This case, like the landmark 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, involves a white student who applied to a public university and was denied– and, according to the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, minority students with lower scores than hers were admitted. In Grutter, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of quota systems for racial minorities in public university admissions was unconstitutional, but it also held that admissions committees may use race as one of a myriad factors that go into the admissions process– not unlike the way admissions committees favor students who are legacies or those who hail from Barrow, Alaska (so that they can claim in brochures that they attract students from all fifty states–and Guam!). In other words, race might be a factor that gives your application a little nudge toward the top of the pile, but it can’t be the sole determining factor in an admission decision. Continue reading
Commentary
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I assume you’ve been paying close attention to Rick Santorum’s rhetoric. If you’re not, then jeez, this must be a really boring political season for you. But if you are paying attention, then you know that Rick Santorum says things, and that the things he says, they mean things, other things, important things. Republicans seem to agree: Santorum is a good speaker, which is important in a President, unless that President is Barack Obama, in which case good speaking skills only prove what a strange, dangerous Other he is. Continue reading
You’ve probably heard a lot about Jeremy Lin lately. From sports writers with some terrible puns, sports fans, and from a lot of racial issues blogs who were annoyed with some terrible, skirting the edges of racist puns. However, someone at ESPN screwed up big time, and whether it was an accident, or intentional, there are a few lessons we can all take away from this. Continue reading
I’m currently reading The Emperor of All Maladies. It’s a great book on the history of cancer and cancer treatments. Reading it is like sitting in the observation desk of a surgical theater while a new and especially tricky procedure is being conducted. You are witnessing one of the scariest moments of someone’s life and the most triumphant moment in another’s. Yet your attention is not on the sedated person, the one who will pay with their life should things not go as planned. Your attention is on the person in the scrubs, with the knife. Continue reading
Apparently, Thursday was a painfully slow sports news day. Otherwise, I can’t explain how an article titled ‘Lebron not ruling out return to Cavaliers’ pops up into my news feed, thanks to the AP. Continue reading
Nancy Grace seems to think so. In the following video, Grace thinks that Whitney falls into the same category as Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson and that there is more to her death than meets the eye. Continue reading
In the decades following her death, Marilyn Monroe has been exalted as the human embodiment of bygone Hollywood glamour and unmatched sex appeal but recently, she has been given another accolade: the counterweight to our culture’s ever-thinner beauty ideal. The oft-invoked argument centers around the declaration that Monroe was a size 8/10/12/14 and if she were alive today, she would be considered overweight and probably, never would have been a star. (These claims are inherently problematic because women’s apparel sizing has varied considerably over the years, rendering numbers utterly useless as indications of proportion and because such conjectures are speculative and sensational in nature.) Continue reading
Remember when we said anyone who believes Mitt Romney gives a shit that you know he’s rich hasn’t been listening very closely? Yeah, well, not to be outdone, Rick Santorum has a message he’d like to share about his prescription for that little pesky thing called womanhood. Continue reading
In the midst of a seemingly endless primary season, one of the more interesting subtexts of each state’s GOP primary is the fundraising boost the winner has received in the immediate aftermath of their victory. Moon Pilgrim Newt Gingrich saw it after his South Carolina victory in January, and, on the heels of a three state sweep on Tuesday, Rick Santorum felt the sweet embrace of conservative donors stuffing grubby singles into his sweater vest. Continue reading
A warning—this post is on a difficult subject to discuss. Not only am I unable to tell the full story and incapable of being impartial or unsentimental, but I may still very well fail to do the Clementi family justice. If it weren’t for my own siblings, I wouldn’t have made the attempt.
In this week’s New Yorker, Ian Parker reexamines the ongoing case of Tyler Clementi, a household name for the worst reasons a parent (or frankly, a student) could imagine.
Using Tyler’s own words and interviews with witnesses and family, Parker creates an incomplete but valuable portrait of a reserved, thoughtful teenager who had just come out to his family when he started his freshman year at Rutgers University. Continue reading