Yearly Archives: 2011

What Were We Thinking?

2/3/2011 – 1:32 pm

I was walking across campus that October afternoon when I heard the news. I rushed to the Journalism Department where the Associated Press Teletype was clattering in its insulated booth. Other J-students and professors were gathered around, tearing off the reports as they came in and silently passing them around. Anwar Sadat was dead, assassinated […]

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Mafia States

1/27/2011 – 2:47 pm

This week’s paper edition of Newsweek (I can’t find it online) has a story about Tunisia and carries this subhead: “Ben Ali’s fall has exposed the rotten truth of every regime in the Arab world: they’re all, in effect, mafia states, each operating as a lucrative family business.” Pretty harsh, but a) probably true b) […]

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It Wasn’t Always a Tiger

1/20/2011 – 4:49 pm

“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Catch a tiger by the toe.” That’s the rhyme we used as six-year-olds trying to settle the important issue of Who Should Go First. I knew from my parents that the individual caught by the toe had not always been a tiger. The euphemistic tiger was substituted sometime, I imagine, in […]

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Farewell, Sally Bowles

1/13/2011 – 3:48 pm

Jill Haworth died January 3 in Manhattan at age 65. The British-born actress originated the role of Sally Bowles in the musical “Cabaret” in 1966 On January 8, I read the news to see five people connected to WikiLeaks had their Twitter accounts subpoenaed by a grand jury that had previously been operating in secret. […]

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Numbers, Large and Small

1/6/2011 – 12:43 pm

“As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens.” It’s an old Vermont weather proverb and reads like one, too. I can see the crusty old dude by the potbellied stove with the gumboots and plaid mackinaw draped over the back of his chair. Alert readers will remember I referred to the proverb a year ago this […]

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