Well worth reading: an NYT article that, though oddly incomplete in places, unveils the ambiguities of international food aid. The cloven hoof pops out in sentences like this one, which refers to

For $700,000 the University of California could have paid about 50 full-time graduate stipends. Wouldn't that have been a better investment than feeding this pitiful bureaucrat's sense of entitlement?

I never felt right blaming stupidity, greed or racism for the ills of the Republic, so this New Yorker article, tracing many tentacles to their common lair, makes it possible to blame a cluster of individuals who want the political agenda in this country to be based on a passel of convenient lies. Ecrasez l'infâme!

No, Maureen Dowd, the president's job is not to be a patriarch and it's not to be an entertainer. I don't know why the New York Times hired you to be a “liberal” commentator. Your expectations fit no one so well as Ronald Reagan.

When setting up the reading lists for my fall courses, I noticed that paperbacks I bought a few years back for $20 or so are now going for upwards of $70-- same publisher, same edition (somewhat blurrier and with lower-quality cover stock). It looks as if publishers have decided that where large volumes are not going to be sold-- that is, with somewhat specialized academic titles-- the only way to underwrite their costs is by marking up the product massively. (However, they must be making this calculation on the entirely of their backlist, because the books I am talking about were first printed in the 1970s and 80s, and no new investment has been made in them since then, beyond perhaps asking an intern to feed them through a scanner.)
At the same time, I find that my university owns some of these titles as electronic books.
What to do? I believe in academic publishing, I like to have physical books on the shelf, and I think we should all buy more books to keep the presses alive. But I can't say to my undergraduates, “Write off the $70 in a few years, when you're a professional semiologist.”

Wonderful: Iliad, Inc., sends a letter to Homer's publishers, threatening a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
(OK, it's dated April 1, and today is August 9, but I couldn't resist.)

Peeps, Bob Herbert is on the line and he's mad about the erosion of the US's status as a college education power. One aid to diagnosis: look into the comments, where you'll see hundreds of people battering on their automatic hot buttons, blaming “the Democrats” (for low standards and social promotion) and “the Republicans” (for offshoring jobs, cutting school spending and instituting high-stakes multiple-choice tests) alternately. As long as the response is so analytically impoverished, I don't expect we will get any closer to solving the problem. It would take: (a) a general agreement on the aims of education, (b) the will to spend money on teachers and teacher training, (c) some prospect of a desirable outcome for the experimental subjects, i.e., the students, which refers us back to (a). My little hint to anyone interested in joining the debate: Since the days of the ever-expanding economic pie seem to be over, education needs to be linked to a goal different from a clean job paying $200,000/year and up.

Free-enterprise doctrinaires and dogmatics love to extol competition. What if a crew of capable, public-spirited professionals, with the support and resources of the US government, were to go about nationalizing any pieces of our balky private health system that are collapsing, and gave a good example by offering better care for less money? That would be worth trying, say I from my temporary perch in a country where the single-payer system, seconded by mutual insurance coops, does quite well. And take a look at this snapshot from Haiti seven months after the earthquake.