Category Archives: Commentary

A Place Faster and More Reckless

5/28/1998 – 10:21 am

The school year is ending. College graduations are winding down, high school graduations will begin any week. This is also the season for automobile crashes, particularly among the high school set. As sure as caps and gowns, young people, in pairs and groups, will die in streambeds, along embankments and against trees. I understand how […]

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Instant, Endless Summer

5/21/1998 – 10:22 am

Sometimes I think I must be the oldest person on earth. I’m speaking from northwest Vermont, about 40 miles from the Canadian border. For the last ten days or so, we’ve had hot, sunny weather. People walk up and down Church Street wearing shorts and sunburns. Down at the lake, 50 sailboats bob at their […]

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Bad Science, Bad Law

5/14/1998 – 10:24 am

I spend a fair amount of time reading popular journals and lately, I keep running across Harvard’s Edmund O. Wilson promoting his new book, which is about something he calls “consilience.” If I understand Dr. Wilson correctly, what he means by consilience is that common ground of understanding that joins several academic disciplines. Dr. Wilson […]

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How to Lie with Statistics

5/7/1998 – 10:26 am

One of the few college textbooks I still hold onto is a small volume by Darrell Huff called How to Lie With Statistics. It’s a humorous book that tells you how to make numbers say anything you want them to say. I was in Washington, DC last weekend, thinking about Mr. Huff and his book […]

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Eat the Rich

4/30/1998 – 10:27 am

I live in Vermont and I’m an outsider, an immigrant – a flatlander in local parlance. I’m not from around here. The local standard has it that to be considered a Vermonter, not only do you have to have been born here, but your parents have to have been born here, too. That’s setting the […]

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Don’t Get Caught

4/23/1998 – 10:29 am

I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about – relationships. Wait! Wait! Please, don’t go switching over to Pacifica just yet. This isn’t going to be what you think it is, I swear. I recently read in a magazine that the Reverend John Papworth, of the Church of England, last year told […]

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Functional Extinction

4/16/1998 – 10:31 am

I’ve been thinking about cloning lately. I know the big debate on cloning was last year when Scottish scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep. All the pundits came out in the newspapers and tee vee and said this or that and it all went away and we forgot about it for a few months until […]

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