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Foreign Affairs
Copyright 1998 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
November, 1998 / December, 1998HEADLINE: License to Kill;
Usama bin Ladin's Declaration of Jihad
BYLINE: Bernard Lewis; BERNARD LEWIS is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His books include The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, and, most recently, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.
On February 23, 1998, Al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic newspaper published in London, printed the full text of a "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders." According to the paper, the statement was faxed to them under the signatures of Usama bin Ladin, the Saudi financier blamed by the United States for masterminding the August bombings of its embassies in East Africa, and the leaders of militant Islamist groups in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The statement -- a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose -- reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar. Bin Ladin's grievances are not quite what many would expect. ...
First -- For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.
Though some in the past have disputed the true nature of this occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety have now recognized it.
There is no better proof of this than the continuing American aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from Arabia despite its rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories for this purpose but are subjugated. ...
Time
Copyright 1998 The Time Inc. Magazine Company
November 16, 1998
HEADLINE: Milestones
DIED. LARRY ELLIS, 70, the 1984 U.S. Olympic men's track coach who for 22 years led Princeton to a string of championships; of a pulmonary embolism; in Skillman, N.J. He was the first black Ivy League head coach.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Copyright 1998 Telegraph Group Limited (London)
November 11, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: Science: Your brain is still growing
Cells that can rejuvenate our grey matter may hold the key to mentally debilitating diseases, reports Roger HighfieldBYLINE: By Roger Highfield
BODY: SURGEONS will one day repair a brain damaged by stroke, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's by implanting lab-grown brain cells or even stimulating the patient to grow their own.
This may sound more fiction than science but the prospect has drawn significantly closer as a result of several stunning discoveries. These all offer new approaches to brain repair that do not require experiments with foetal nerve tissue and the attendant ethical problems.
Teams at the Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University and University of Wisconsin have isolated stem cells - "parent cells" - which retain the ability to develop into nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain and nervous system while also retaining the ability to reproduce continuously. ...
The implications of this work are underlined by studies on our closest relatives. Only yesterday, at the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles, the first evidence that neurogenesis occurs in the brains of adult macaque monkeys - Old World primates closely related to humans - was reported by Dr David Kornack's team at Yale University and Prof Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University, working with Dr Eberhard Fuchs of the German Primate Centre. "We found that a substantial number of new neurons were produced in the hippocampal region," said Prof Gould. "We also discovered that the production of these cells diminishes with ageing." ...
Working with Dr Tracey Shors, Princeton University's Prof Gould also recently demonstrated that learning tasks which depend on the hippocampus can prevent a substantial number of new neurons from dying. "We have found a direct relationship between neurogenesis and hippocampal-dependent learning, which indicates that it is learning specifically, and not merely general experience, that slows down the death of new neurons," said Prof Gould. ...
The Associated Press
November 10, 1998, Tuesday
HEADLINE: Disaster preparedness, flood insurance limits proposed by FEMA
BYLINE: By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Trying to switch government emphasis from disaster recovery to prevention, Federal Emergency Management Director James Lee Witt proposed limiting subsidized flood insurance and banning it in some cases.
Witt said Tuesday that flood insurance should no longer be provided to homeowners who have filed two or more claims that total more than the value of their home and who refuse to either elevate the home or accept a buyout.
In addition, he said, the agency should charge people who live in high-risk areas the fair market rates for flood insurance, instead of the lower subsidized prices currently available. ...
Witt's comments came just days after Princeton University researchers reported that the costs of natural catastrophes affecting America have skyrocketed even though the number of disasters hasn't increased significantly.
The problem: People and their wealth are increasingly concentrated in vulnerable areas and government policies such as subsidized flood insurance seem to make the problem worse.
Richard Allen, who took part in the study published in Eos, a weekly newsmagazine of the American Geophysical Union, said that not only is the population migrating to areas of natural hazard, but it's the wealthiest who are moving there. ...
The Moscow Times
Copyright 1998 Independent Press
November 10, 1998
HEADLINE: Russia Should be Prevented From Going Nationalistic
BYLINE: By Gary Peach
Russia's communists, members of an intellectually bankrupt and morally decadent movement, have found their domicile behind the aegis of economic nationalism. Now that Marxism is dead and buried, a fact that no communist has the courage to admit, it is behind this shield they will stay.
Nationalism, together with liberalism and communism, is one of the three broad economic systems defined by political scientists. It has in the past been referred to as mercantilism, statism and protectionism, but as Robert Gilpin, professor of international affairs at Princeton University, writes, "all nationalists ascribe to the primacy of the state, of national security and of military power in the organization and functioning of the international system." The interests of the state - and not of capital or a particular class (i.e. the proletariat) - are given priority in a nationalist economy.
It is important to note that nationalism, as opposed to capitalism and Marxism, has strictly defined limits: Whereas capital knows no boundaries, and drifts to where risk is lowest and profit highest, and communism represents a future societal ideal uniting proletariats throughout the world, nationalism maintains a vision that ends abruptly at the border. For nationalists, the international arena is filled with deceit, greed and war, and all efforts within an economy should be directed at protecting the state. As Gilpin explains, this "protection" is normally achieved through coordinated policies of industrialization and militarization. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 10, 1998, Tuesday
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
PARKER, GEORGE JR.
PARKER-George Jr. Of San Antonio and Dallas, Texas died on November 7, 1998 in Dallas, Texas. He is survived by his brothers Joseph B. Parker and wife Mary Anne, John M. Parker and wife Patricia; William A. Parker and wife Camilla, his sister-in-law Mrs. Harry J. Parker and numerous nieces and nephews. Mr. Parker was a parishioner of Christ the King Catholic Church. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 4, 1920 and graduated from Cascia Hall, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Philips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, Princeton University and University of Michigan Law School. ...
Omaha World-Herald
Copyright 1998 The Omaha World-Herald Company
November 10, 1998, Tuesday
HEADLINE: Speaker Details Risks Of Immigrants' Children
BYLINE: CINDY GONZALEZ
SOURCE: WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Recent immigrants' children, faced with pressures and barriers unlike generations before them, challenge the notion that there is one formula for succeeding in the United States, a national immigration expert said Monday in Omaha.
Alejandro Portes, a Princeton University professor and Creighton University alumnus, said some second-generation immigrants will move up by adopting the traditional American culture. Others will do well, he said, by clinging to their ethnic identity. Still others will move down by joining a less desirable group, such as a street gang, to fit in, he said.
"They're assimilating to America, but to a very different type of America," Portes said. The concept that children of immigrants will veer into different levels of American life is what Portes calls segmented assimilation.
Today's second-generation immigrants are primarily the children of parents who entered the United States in the past decade, he said. The risk of these second-generationers creating a subculture whose opportunities fall short of their Americanized expectations only recently has caught the attention of policy-makers, Portes said.
"People, the government, should be concerned," he said. "This is not only a large population, but it is fast-growing. The fate of that second generation is going to largely determine the fate of ethnic relations in America." ...
The Bond Buyer
Copyright 1998 The Bond Buyer, Inc.
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Nonprofits'Issuance Rose 77% After Congress Lifted Debt Cap
BYLINE: By Amy B. Resnick
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Nonprofit institutions issued 77% more new money tax- exempt bonds in the year after Congress lifted a $150 million cap on that kind of debt, than in the 12 months before the change.
The numbers are even more dramatic for debt issued by private colleges and universities - the largest part of the nonhospital private nonprofit sector - where issuance jumped 99.22% to $3.33 billion in the year after Aug. 5, 1997, from $1.67 billion in the 12 months before the cap was repealed, according to information from Securities Data Co.
While several sources said the historic low interest rate levels are driving up bond issuance in all sectors, the numbers show that private higher education issuance grew as a percentage of the total market in that period as well.
In 1996, private colleges and universities accounted for about 1.5% of the long-term municipal debt issued. That figure rose to 1.6% in 1997 and jumped to 2.1% to date in 1998, according to SDC's data. ...
The rise comes in the year after Congress in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 - led by retiring New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee - changed a provision first created by the 1986 Tax Act that limited the amount of tax-exempt bonds nonprofits could have outstanding to $150 million. ...
Princeton University vice president of finance and administration Richard R. Spies, said his school was in the process of putting a taxable CP program in place when the law was changed. That program, underwritten and remarketed by J.P. Morgan Securities Inc., now has about $40 million outstanding in tax-exempt debt under that program and about $200 million overall, Spies said.
"Overall, the change was quite important. It gives institutions more flexibility. We've chosen to use it in a limited way and we have the ability to use it more," Spies said. "For all (institutions) this lowers the cost of buildings and maintenance, which lowers the cost for students and families and the federal government for the cost of research." ...
Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 1998 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
November 9, 1998, MONDAY
HEADLINE: Robert D. Mayo, English professor
BYLINE: BY MARY HOULIHAN-SKILTON
Robert D. Mayo, a former English professor and department chairman at Northwestern University, died Friday in Evanston. He was 88.
A native of Chicago, Mr. Mayo studied at Oberlin College.
He received graduate degrees from both the University of Chicago and Princeton University. He did his doctoral work at Princeton. ...
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Why Heroes Are Hard To Come By
BYLINE: Sara Terry, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
HIGHLIGHT: Glenn's Return
Thomas Jefferson kept a list of them on his wall. So did Albert Einstein. Ralph Waldo Emerson fretted over whether Napoleon was a true one.
Heroes. With all the adulation that's been heaped on second-time astronaut John Glenn - not to mention all the hand wringing over whether there are any truly great men and women around these days - historians say it's worth noting that Americans have obsessed about heroes for centuries.
"There is this kind of hero panic that we're in at the moment," says Sean Wilentz, a professor and director of the American studies program at Princeton University in New Jersey. "But that's a perennial in American history. Each generation seems to go through it." ...
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Retooling the Financial Fire Fighter
BYLINE: David R. Francis, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: BOSTON
The United States and other major nations have been working to fireproof the international financial system.
They are putting in alarm systems, installing fire walls, and strengthening the financial fire department - a.k.a. the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Will planned changes do the job? Will they prevent the Asian financial fire from spreading, and deter future crises?
"I'm somewhat more confident about the system," says Peter Kenen, a Princeton University economist who helped draft suggestions for reform by the Group of 22, a mixture of major industrial nations and key developing countries.
Reform first, then success
Success, though, depends on implementing some reforms. "Then I would have more confidence," says Professor Kenen.
The first step - strengthening the IMF - is almost done. Last month, Congress approved a $17.9 billion contribution to the IMF - with reform conditions attached.
That will enable the IMF to get fresh funding, totalling $90 billion, from its 182 member nations. The money is earmarked for loans to nations in financial distress. ...
Congressional Press Releases
Copyright 1998 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: HEAT FOR GLOBAL WARMING TREATY ESCAPING
BYLINE: MIKE ENZI , SENATOR , SENATE
Washington, D.C. - Wyoming Us. Senator Mike Enzi believes the U.S. Senate's strong stance, a realization of incredible financial sacrifice, a lack of cooperation from developing nations, the recent elections and disagreement within the scientific community are slowing the drive for a global warming treaty. Enzi, who returned yesterday front Buenos Aires, Argentina where a world global climate change conference is being held, met with a number of foreign delegations and Clinton Administration negotiators to remind them that the U.S. Senate will not ratify a treaty that exports U.S. jobs overseas and does not require meaningful steps taken by the whole world, including developing nations. Enzi also said that unlike the Kyoto, Japan global warming conference he attended last year, economic implications were in the spotlight. ...
Another item Enzi encouraged the U.S. team to emphasize are "sinks" or areas of natural absorption of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as healthy forests and oceans. Creation or maintenance of "sinks" shown to absorb greenhouse gases could lessen the "need" to reduce emission. Enzi pointed to a study conducted at Princeton University that has measured air on U.S. borders. According to the study, the U.S. is not exporting any carbon dioxide, but rather is absorbing it in "sinks". Enzi said this brings out the underlying question of conclusive evidence a global warming problem exists and just as important, "what portion of that problem would be solved if every person on this earth worked to solve it. ...
The Fresno Bee
Copyright 1998 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
November 9, 1998
HEADLINE: GETTING THE VOTE;
Reedley's Jake Warmerdam, 18, gets through his first voting experience not the least bit overwhelmed.
BYLINE: Shirley Armbruster, The Fresno Bee
DATELINE: REEDLEY
Editor's note: In this installment of our occasional series of stories on rites of passage, The Bee takes a look at an 18-year-old's first voting experience. Though analysts characterize the under-24 age group as politically apathetic, this high school student gladly stepped up to the ballot box on Nov. 3.
Jake Warmerdam pushes aside the black plastic sheet and emerges from the cardboard voting booth, grinning as three precinct workers applaud.
Other voters in line at Christ Lutheran Church Fellowship Hall have a puzzled, "what's-the-big-deal?" look, and the elections workers explain Jake has just voted for the first time. ...
The Warmerdams, however, take elections seriously. Jake's father, Barry, a geography instructor at Reedley College, holds an elected seat on the Sierra Kings District Hospital board. His mother, Cathy, was a longtime precinct worker until she started teaching last year at Sheridan Elementary School in Orange Cove. Now she works June elections. And Jake's aunt, Lynn Warmerdam, was the precinct worker who signed him in when he voted Tuesday.
In the last few days before an election, Barry Warmerdam says he and his wife usually work hard to be well informed. To prepare for this vote, they saved fliers and voters' guides that came to their home, picked up brochures at the Big Fresno Fair and attended a "Meet the Candidates" night in Reedley. ...
Barry and Cathy Warmerdam, both Republicans, don't mind that Jake didn't follow their party affiliation in this election: "That will make your oldest brother happy," says Cathy Warmerdam, noting that 21-year-old Nathan, a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also hasn't stated his party affiliation. Their second son, Steve, 20, is a sophomore at Princeton University and a registered Republican. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: In Jefferson-Hemings Tie, a Family's Pride; The Human Story
To the Editor:
A Nov. 6 letter makes the point that a prejudiced application of historical method led scholars to rule out a Jefferson-Hemings liaison. The point can be argued more tellingly by acknowledging Fawn Brodie, the biographer who put a human side to the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in her 1974 book, "Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History."
Even though Ms. Brodie affirmed that she could only suggest, but not prove, the reality of this relationship, the weight of the Jefferson establishment fell upon her. I recall Jefferson research materials being put off limits to Ms. Brodie and efforts to lobby scholars and the news media to discredit her work. Dumas Malone, Jefferson's major biographer, in an infamous debate with Ms. Brodie, conceded he could accept a one-night stand but not a relationship.
Ms. Brodie, insisting that the modern Jefferson establishment was reading its own prejudices back into Jefferson's time, rested her case.
ALFRED L. BUSH
Princeton, N.J., Nov. 6, 1998
The writer is curator of the Princeton Collections of Western Americana, Princeton University.
PR Newswire
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic Names Richard 0. Scribner as New President and CEO
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J., Nov. 9
Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D) announced today that Richard 0. Scribner, a Wall Street executive and longtime member of RFB&D's national board of directors has been appointed President & CEO for the national nonprofit organization, effective January 1. Scribner is currently a managing director and co-chief compliance officer at the international securities firm of Salomon Smith Barney in New York.
Now in its 50th year RFB&D is the only source for textbooks on tape and computer disk for people who cannot read standard print effectively because of a visual impairment, severe dyslexia or another physical disability. ...
A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Scribner also serves on the board of trustees of Princeton University and he has been active with numerous other educational and community organizations. ...
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1998 The San Diego Union-Tribune
November 09, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: ILL & ILLITERATE; Whose responcibility is it that patients understand how to take their medication?
SOURCE: HEALTH & FITNESS NEWS SERVICE
BYLINE: Deborah Shelton
Not everyone can carry out doctor's orders.
Take the woman who was asked how she would administer the antibiotics prescribed to treat her child's ear infection. She measured the amoxicillin in a large serving spoon and then asked whether to pour it in the baby's ear or mouth.
Then, there's the elderly man who landed in an emergency department with congestive heart failure. He had stopped taking his ACE inhibitor while his daughter was on vacation because he couldn't read the pill bottle. ...
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the largest study ever to examine the prevalence of health illiteracy. The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995, were eye-opening. ....
Most of the patients with inadequate or marginal health literacy -- 63 percent of those with hypertension and 55 percent of the diabetics -- didn't know that canned vegetables contain a lot of salt or that feeling shaky is an indication of a low glucose level.
"Clearly, it's in our best interests to try and develop a response -- short of teaching people how to read -- to improve treatment outcomes," said Stephen A. Somers, and president of the Center for Health Care Strategies, a nonprofit policy and resource center affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
The Tampa Tribune
Copyright 1998 The Tribune Co. Publishes The Tampa Tribune
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Liquid-crystal will get skinny competition;
BYLINE: Tribune wire services;
The people who made possible the notebook computer and the thin desktop monitor are reaching toward an even thinner target as an alternative to the liquid-crystal displays, currently the gold standard in flat panels.
LCDs are expensive, with a 14- or 15- inch flat monitor costing $600 to $800 and a larger LCD monitor from $2,000 to $4,000.
LCDs consist of liquid crystals sandwiched between glass plates, plus various filters and polarizers. Behind this assembly is a light source, often a fluorescent tube. When electricity is applied, the liquid crystal molecules align in such a way that they act as shutters, either allowing the light to pass through or blocking it.
Universal Display Corp., a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., company is working on what experts say is one of the most promising LCD alternatives, organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.
OLEDs are emissive displays, which means they are made of materials that produce their own light, rather than relying on a backlight, as liquid crystal displays do.
The company in partnership with Princeton University and the University of Southern California expects commercial applications within a few years. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 09, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Retirees Going Back to School -- to Live
BYLINE: Cindy Loose, Washington Post Staff Writer
When it was time to retire, Bill and Virginia Binger did what Americans are supposed to do: They headed south to retirement heaven and built their dream home.
But heaven, they found, was not only too hot, it was dull. So they fled the dream and moved to Iowa.
Iowa?
Yes, cold, snowy Iowa, because their alma mater, Iowa State University, had an enticing place for people like them.
The Bingers now live in one of a growing number of university-affiliated retirement homes. These are facilities that testify to an appetite among educated, affluent retirees for more than golf and sunshine, more than "fishing, drinking and going to Wal-Mart," as one retiree attending a presentation for a new Penn State development said last month. ...
The University of Alabama and Louisiana State University are negotiating development terms with the consulting firm Cooperative Retirement Services of America. Duke University, which already has informal ties to one retirement property near campus, has contracted with Cooperative Retirement Services to study the feasibility of building a complex with more formal ties. Institutions considering building retirement communities also include Dartmouth, Princeton, the University of Washington, Lehigh University and the University of Connecticut. ...
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
November 9, 1998, Monday
HEADLINE: Human cloning draws nearer as ethicists seek to draw rules;
With bans ineffectual, market for babies drives research
BYLINE: August Gribbin; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A lady in Lyons, France, says she can re-create you. You'll have to put up $200,000, wait possibly two years and endure secrecy and suspense. But then you will be cloned and able to watch yourself grow up.
That is the deal Brigitte Boisselier offers.
A chemist with advanced degrees earned in France and the United States, Miss Boisselier directs a Bahamas-based operation called "Clonaid." On its World Wide Web home page she offers "to provide assistance to would-be parents willing to have a child cloned from one of them." She says Clonaid offers homosexual couples a "fantastic opportunity" to have a child.
Even if Miss Boisselier is dealing in fantasy, recent events in reproductive technology indicate a cloned child could be born soon into a world scientists warn is dangerously unprepared. ...
As Dr. Lee Silver, a Princeton University microbiologist and leading authority on human cloning puts it, "Infertility is not an illness, not life-threatening. There's no justification for this human experiment." He says Dr. Grifo's project is reckless when the high failure rate in animal experiments is considered.
"Typically, whenever you try medical experiments you do animal experiments and other experiments first," he says. "But reproductive technology has a history of trying new techniques in humans before testing them in other ways. That happens because reproductive technology is driven by the marketplace." ...
Regarding the appropriate reasons for cloning, Princeton's Mr. Silver says there is just one. He says human cloning is ethical and should be allowed "for the purpose of building a loving family."
He concludes: "Obviously, you can't legislate love, but the notion of intention to build a family as the single valid use of the technology would clearly disallow abuses."
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 9, 1998 Monday
HEADLINE: ROBERT MAYO, 88, NU ENGLISH PROFESSORBYLINE: By Phuong Le, Tribune Staff Writer.
Robert D. Mayo, 88, of Evanston, a professor emeritus of English at Northwestern University who taught for 35 years, died Friday in Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Chicago.
A native of Chicago, Mr. Mayo received an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College. He began teaching at Oberlin after obtaining a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago and Princeton University. ...
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
November 8, 1998
HEADLINE: Plan to expand, diversify Princeton student body draws mixed reactions
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
A faculty proposal to increase Princeton University's enrollment by 500 to 600 students is drawing fire from its student government association, even though the expansion may not happen for years.
"Princeton is not Harvard," SGA president David Ascher told The Times of Trenton.
"We are a smaller university with greater emphasis on the faculty-student relationship."
Last month, a faculty group studying the Ivy League school's admissions released a report recommending that 125 to 150 students be added to each class.
The group, led by university president Harold Shapiro, determined that too many good students either were being rejected or were not applying because they could not afford Princeton's pricey tuition. It recommended admitting more people to increase the student body's ethnic and economic diversity. ...
The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 1998 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
November 08, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: The freedom to rant;
Study of political correctness on campus fails to prove point
BYLINE: CARLIN ROMANO; Carlin Romano wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. By Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate. Free Press, $27.50. AMERICANS grow up insisting "it's a free country," particularly when someone tries to curb their freedom. They do not, however, typically declare "It's a free corporation" or "It's a free family" or "It's a free marriage."
One thing even Americans learn when they grow up in that other sense - when they learn how life really works - is that freedom, however exalted a political value of America the republic, does not automatically (or even logically) enjoy similar status in smaller units of America the complex society. Even in the land of the free, liberty is a social commodity whose whole isn't equal to the sum of its parts.
Is that a paradox or just an apparent paradox? If freedom rings in the Founding Fathers' vision of the American polis, must it ring so loudly that it drowns out every other value - equality, for example, or kindness - in any smaller community that's still bigger than me, myself and I?
Such questions lie at the philosophical heart of The Shadow University, a hybrid of report and polemic stirred by outrage that today's American universities and colleges - like our families, corporations, newspapers and football teams - are not paradigms of freedom. An unusual collaboration by two principled activists on opposite sides of the political spectrum, The Shadow University allows its co-authors to gong the liberty bell, producing a peculiar stereo effect.
Alan Charles Kors is a University of Pennsylvania historian, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, a former hawk on the Vietnam War and a libertarian who votes Republican. Harvey A. Silverglate is resolutely liberal, a leading civil-liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Mass.
Fast friends since they met as Princeton University freshmen in 1960, Kors and Silverglate differ on policy issues but jointly oppose what they call, in their book's subtitle, "the betrayal of liberty on America's campuses." ...
THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR
Copyright 1998 The Indianapolis Newspapers, Inc.
November 8, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: Better education with choice option
SOURCE: ROBERT C. ENLOW
Michael Nolan and parents for Public Education are deeply concerned about the state of public schools in Indianapolis. As a parent, I mirror that concern. However, I would like to suggest that Nolan and his cohorts rethink their stance against educational choice (Oct. 21, "Why choice is not the best alternative").
What could be more American than allowing parents a free choice of schools, and what could be more un-American than denying them that choice? If parents, especially low-income parents, are dissatisfied with the status quo, why should government bureaucrats, Parents for Public Education or anyone deny them the opportunity to do what is best for their children?
On an educational level, studies from Harvard, Princeton and the University of Houston plainly show that students participating in public voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland score better on standardized tests than their public school counterparts. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 8, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: BOOKEND;
The Man Who Understood Balanchine
BYLINE: By Edmund White; Edmund White's most recent novel is "The Farewell Symphony." His short life of Proust will be published in January. He teaches at Princeton University.
In the 1970's I used to run into Edwin Denby during intermissions of the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. I was reminded of him and everything he stood for in New York cultural life by "Dance Writings & Poetry," a new selection of his work edited by Robert Cornfield and published in both hardcover and paperback by Yale University Press.
I was introduced to Denby at least 10 times, though he never remembered me from one time to another. He would always be accompanied by much younger gay men connected to the art or dance world. He was small, old, handsome, pale as an ivory crucifix, with a full head of white hair and a kindly smile; he almost never spoke, but when he did he whispered. As Robert Cornfield explains in his excellent but all too brief introduction, "After some years of devastating illness and deteriorating memory, Denby died by his own hand in the summer of 1983." He was born in 1903, in China; his father was an American diplomat.
Although by the time I met him Denby had neither written nor spoken publicly for several years (the last item in this collection, which covers 30 years of work, is a 1966 Dance Magazine Award acceptance speech), nevertheless his sepulchral presence, his dignity and beauty and his attendance at almost every performance of Balanchine's company symbolized the role that that particular organization had played in New York's intellectual and cultural life since the 1950's. The lobby of the State Theater was the one place where you could see, night after night, literary intellectuals like Susan Sontag, the poetry critic David Kalstone, the essayist Richard Poirier, the cartoonist Edward Gorey, the music and dance critic Dale Harris, the editor of Knopf, Robert Gottlieb -- and dozens of others. Kalstone used to joke that only an entirely nonverbal art could possibly appeal to so many contentious people. He also recognized that we were all enjoying a rare privilege -- the unfolding of genius. Balanchine had started out in imperial Russia, reached his first apogee under Diaghilev in France and, in the 1930's, moved to the United States, where he led dance to summits it had never known before. He was arguably the only genius of this range and force at work in New York in those years -- the only one, in fact, comparable to two other Russians who flowered in the States: Nabokov and Stravinsky.
If Denby could understand Balanchine, it was partly because he himself had trained as a gymnast and had danced professionally. In his reviews for The New York Herald Tribune and Dance magazine, among other places, he comments on the way a dancer carries her neck, spine, elbows, hands; he employs delicious adjectives ("the beautifully effaced shoulders . . . the arrowy ankles and feet"). Just as important as Denby's dance training, however, was the fact that he was a civilized man who had accumulated an international sense of culture. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 8, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: MUSIC;
Reclaiming A Rich History Of New Opera
BYLINE: By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
WHEN "Ravenshead," a new opera by Steven Mackey, is performed on Thursday evening at the Miller Theater of Columbia University, Jack Beeson, the avuncular 77-year-old composer and former Columbia professor, will be in attendance. Mr. Beeson's presence will meaningfully connect the university's new commitment to contemporary opera, which "Ravenshead" represents, to its important role in opera history more than four decades ago. This story has mostly been forgotten, though many of the operas generated at the time have secured places in the repertory. ...
This rich history is little remembered. Mr. Mackey, who at 42 is making his first foray into opera, but who spent two years as a visiting professor at Columbia in the early 1990's, acknowledges that he knows little about the university's operatic legacy.
"Of course I had heard of those important works and composers," Mr. Mackey said recently from his home near Princeton University, where he teaches. "But I didn't really put it together that Columbia was the center for such activity." ...
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 1998 San Antonio Express-News
November 8, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: PC displays could be all rolled up in the future
BYLINE: Leslie J. Nicholson; Knight Ridder
Take a look at the monitor on your desktop computer. Chances are it's heavy, at least a foot long, and shaped like a TV set.
Fast-forward a decade or so. That big cathode ray tube, or CRT, has been relegated to a museum.
You're sure of it because you just called up the museum's Web page on your new monitor, a sheet that hangs on the living-room wall like a window shade.
Or perhaps you viewed the image on a one-piece computer made of flexible plastic, which you subsequently rolled up and stashed in your briefcase.
Such are the dreams of people in the flat-panel display industry. These are the people who made possible the notebook computer, the camcorder view-screen, and the thin desktop monitor.
Now they are reaching toward an even thinner target, displays no thicker than a piece of poster board and as flexible as a piece of typing paper that will be used in devices as small as cell phones and palmtop computers and as large as wall-size television screens. ...
Universal Display says its organic light-emitting diodes will be formidable competition for LCDs.
OLEDs are relatively cheap and easy to manufacture, use less power, and can be made thin and lightweight.
Universal Display's research partners in developing OLEDs are Princeton University and the University of Southern California. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 08, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: TAKE OUT YOUR NO. 2 PENCILS; Standardized tests like the stanford 9 are the rage in public education. But do they really measure academic achievement, or simply reflect collective anxiety about our schools?
BYLINE: Jay Mathews
When the long envelope arrived from her son Darius's elementary school last fall, Charlette Hedgman reacted slowly and carefully. She knew the thickly numbered columns on the two enclosed sheets were bad news, but she did not raise her voice with Darius or threaten punishment. That was not the way she raised her son. Hiding her disappointment, she sat and thought about what she wanted to say.
On the double-sided sheets, in beige-colored boxes with a light blue border, were the results of the Stanford Achievement Test Series, Ninth Edition, for Darius Q. Leggette, student No. 8276447, age 8 yrs., 01 mos. The sweet-tempered boy with the incandescent grin was beginning second grade at the Ketcham Elementary School, a ramshackle assemblage of brick buildings at the foot of 15th Street SE in Anacostia. The report listed 133 indicators, many as incomprehensible as a corporate tax return, but Hedgman was a classroom aide at another District elementary school. She knew what this meant.
In all six areas of performance -- total reading, vocabulary, reading comprehension, total mathematics, problem solving and procedures -- Darius had received the lowest rating: "below basic." The sheets of paper told her this categorization "indicates little or no mastery of fundamental knowledge and skills." Hedgman didn't know it at the time, but almost half of Darius's classmates at Ketcham Elementary scored equally poorly on the reading portion of the test. ...
All over the District -- and, indeed, the nation -- households were receiving similar packets. In the last two decades standardized tests have become one of the most powerful forces in American education. Psychometrics, the science of measuring the mind, pervades the academic world. Few districts dare to conclude a school year without requiring students to spend several hours filling in circles and rectangles on computerized scoring sheets with No. 2 pencils. The companies that market such tests are approaching $200 million in annual sales, evidence of a boom that by all indications shows no sign of abating.
The tests have become a universal measure of success in the world of public education. Principals and teachers are given bonuses or fired. Students are promoted or forced to repeat grades, placed in programs for the gifted or dispatched to special ed, and some are denied graduation. All occur because of what the indicators and the bar graphs and the pie charts reveal. ...
John Katzman graduated from Princeton University in 1981. After six weeks on Wall Street, he was bored and disheartened, eager to set his own standards instead of the Dow's. He had worked with a small admissions-test-coaching school in college. His parents lent him $3,000 to set up his own operation in their New York apartment.
Today he is the president of the Princeton Review, a $50 million-a-year test-preparation company with 500 locations. His success stems from his knack for unlocking the secrets of standardized tests, particularly the college applicant's worst nightmare, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). So presumably he should be fond of the high-stakes exams and national obsession with testing that have made him wealthy.
In fact, Katzman has an almost thermo-nuclear distaste for standardized testing of any kind. On the telephone from his office in Manhattan, Katzman slides into his anti-test stump speech, an acidic riff on overanxious parents and cowardly bureaucrats. These are people, he says, who can no longer recall the time when they were in school and their parents judged the value of their educations by little more than how much homework they were assigned each night. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 08, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: Looking Beyond Books; Amazon's Bezos Sees Personalization as Key to Cyber-Stores' Future
BYLINE: Leslie Walker, Washington Post Staff Writer
Jeff Bezos believes the Internet store of the future should be able to guess what he wants to buy before he knows himself.
The 34-year-old founder of Amazon.com Inc. is a sci-fi buff who named his dog after the "Star Trek" character Kamala. Couldn't Internet computers compare his online book buys with the gadget purchases of other science-fiction readers, then infer that he might enjoy a wristwatch like the Seiko with the embedded radio transmitter he bought last year?
"It might figure out that I'm a nerd; I read science-fiction books," Bezos says. "Maybe I would be interested in the kind of watch that I have, which updates itself from the atomic clock 36 times a day. No normal person would have this watch."
Bezos erupts in laughter so deep it seems his body might disintegrate. He says he wants to make Amazon.com that smart, and that personal: "We can do that online. We can make it your store, tailor-made for you."
Bezos built what he calls Earth's biggest online book and music store, and it will soon start offering a full selection of videos. Asked what's next for the Seattle-based bookseller, Bezos answers that he will launch a shopping referral service to help his 4.5 million customers discover new products elsewhere on the World Wide Web. He also is redesigning his own online store to create a shopping experience even more personal than it is today. ...
At a Glance: Jeff Bezos
Personal net worth: More than $2 billion
Education: B.S. Princeton University, 1986
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 08, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: When Historians Speak Out
BYLINE: Sean Wilentz
In an uncharacteristically snide and dismissive column, David S. Broder has attacked me, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the other historians, more than 400 in number, who signed a statement deploring the current impeachment proceedings against President Clinton [op-ed, Nov. 1].
Broder accuses us of throwing "a tantrum," and of conducting a "tenured trashing of Congress." He charges that we ignore the fact that the current charges against President Clinton concern not sexual misconduct but perjury, subornation of perjury and obstruction of justice. He likens Schlesinger to "James Carville in cap and gown." And he berates us for daring to raise our voices about a matter that, he says, should be left to the "determination of the members of the House."
Broder must not be listening as carefully as he usually does. We are fully aware of the charges against President Clinton. Portions of the statement that Broder himself quotes object explicitly to the president's private behavior "as well as his subsequent efforts to deceive." Our point, which Broder has missed, is that the charges, even if proven, do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. ...
The writer is a history professor at Princeton University.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 08, 1998, Sunday
Edward 'Ted' Rivinus
Foreign Service Officer
Edward F. "Ted" Rivinus, 82, a retired Foreign Service Officer and former director of the Smithsonian Press, died Nov. 3 in a traffic accident in Cheltenham, Md. He lived in Upper Marlboro.
A spokesman for the Maryland State Police said Mr. Rivinus died in a collision at Route 301 and Rosaryville Road when he ran a red light and was struck broadside by a minivan driven by a Bowie man. The minivan driver and his two daughters were hospitalized, police said.
Mr. Rivinus, a Philadelphia native and 1937 Princeton University graduate, was an Army field artillery officer in the Mediterranean Theater during World War II. After the war, he joined the State Department's Foreign Service, serving 22 years before retiring in 1969. ...
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 8, 1998 Sunday
FROM THE PRECINCTS. A local bookseller tells us what its customers are buying.
Great Expectations Bookstore
911 Foster St., Evanston
TEL. (847) 864-3881
1. THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
By Giles Foden (Knopf $25)
Fictional tale about a Scotsman who became Idi Amin's personal physician.
2. EXOTICS AT HOME
By Michaela DiLeonardo (University of Chicago Press $35)
Critique of contemporary anthropology in America, with an emphasis on race, class and gender.
3. THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER
By William Bowen and Derrick Bok (Princeton University Press $24.95)
A study of the successes of affirmative action over the last 25 years.
Calgary Herald
Copyright 1998 Southam Inc.
November 7, 1998, Saturday
HEADLINE: Princes jostle for Hussein's crown
BYLINE: THE TIMES
DATELINE: AMMAN
A Byzantine feud for the future leadership of Jordan has broken out among the relatives of the ailing King Hussein which elaborate 63rd birthday celebrations being held here in his absence next week will do little to disguise.
Courtiers would like outsiders to believe a smooth transition to his Oxford-educated youngest brother, Prince Hassan, 51, is assured but the real picture is riven with intrigue.
"It is an open secret that under the influence of Queen Noor, his fourth wife, he would like to amend the constitution and make their 18-year-old son, Hamzah, the next monarch, but people believe the king is now too ill to go through with that," said Toujan Feisal, Jordan's first woman MP who was defeated in last year's election.
King Hussein is starting yet another round of chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. ...
The 46-year-old queen, born Lisa Halaby of mixed Syrian and Swedish descent, converted to Islam in 1978. Since the feuding began, she has been the subject of malicious gossip about her pre-marital love life at Princeton University and elsewhere.
In recent weeks, unfounded suggestions have begun to swirl through the salons of Amman that she has Jewish blood.
Regarded jealously by most Jordanian women and suspiciously by many of the men, who see her fashionable outfits and glitzy lifestyle as unbecoming for an Islamic queen, she recently tried to quash the stories of palace dissension.
"I'm committed to supporting who is best qualified to rule Jordan," she said, adding that the King had a vision of the future ruler and "I trust my husband's instincts."
Under the original constitution, Prince Abdullah, a popular lieutenant-general and King Hussein's first-born son, should now be heir-apparent. But the nationality of his mother, the 19-year-old daughter of a British officer whom King Hussein met while Scottish dancing by the Dead Sea, has been used against him. ...
Added to the complications of the Hashemite dynasty (descended from the Prophet Muhammad) are those of a constitution which specified succession to the eldest son, but was altered in 1965 in favour of Prince Hassan.
In a further twist, it bypassed the King's second brother, Prince Muhammad, who is still alive and well in Amman with two sons of his own.
Should Hassan succeed, the heir-apparent would automatically switch to become his 19-year-old son, Rashid.
Behind Prince Rashid's eventual claim is the ambitious hand of his Pakistani-born mother, Princess Sarvath.
Princess Sarvath has emerged as the main rival to the present queen. ...
The National Journal
Copyright 1998 The National Journal, Inc.
November 7, 1998
HEADLINE: New Governor and New Member Biographies for Ohio
Governor: Robert Taft (R)
Ohio Secretary of State Robert Taft, a Republican with a name that's well-known throughout the state, will take over the governor's office after defeating former Democratic state Attorney General Lee Fisher. Taft ensured that the office would stay in Republican hands ...
Taft was born Jan 8, 1942, in Boston and earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1963, a master's in government from Princeton University in 1967, and a law degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1976. ...
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR WEEKEND SATURDAY
NOVEMBER 7, 1998, SATURDAY
HEADLINE: Historians Support Clinton
GUESTS: Sean Wilentz
BYLINE: Scott Simon, Washington, DC
HIGHLIGHT: More than 400 respected historians of the United States hav joined together and taken out an ad in the New York Times to take a firm stand against the impeachment of President Clinton. Scott speaks with Princeton University Historian Sean Wilentzs (WIL-uhnts), instigator of the advertisement.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This is NPR's WEEKEND EDITION. I'm Scott Simon.
On Monday Democratic and Republican lawmakers are expected to debate yet again whether it is prudent, possible or even constitutional to impeach President Clinton. At the insistence of Democrats, a House Judiciary subcommittee has invited scholars and other experts to explain exactly what in their judgments constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors.
The meeting amounts to a history lesson for legislators. It is also predicted to be the next battle ground for each side to make its case for or against the president of the United States. Now if any members of Congress happen to pick up the New York Times of October 30, they would have seen a full page advertisement from more than 400 of this nation's most eminent historians, warning against impeachment.
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz helped write the text of that ad, and he joins us from New York City. ...
SIMON: And first question has to be, all right, are these a bunch of liberal Democrats signing?
WILENTZ: There are certainly some liberal Democrats on that list, but there are lots of others who aren't.
SIMON: I mean Arthur Schlesinger's name is prominent among them.
WILENTZ: Yes, Arthur Schlesinger is there in part because he's the most eminent living authority on the American presidency. We speak as historians not as partisans here.
There are people on that list for example who have called for President Clinton's resignation.
SIMON: Gary Wills (ph) for example at Northwestern
WILENTZ: Gary Wills, yes and Doris Kearns Goodwin (ph) has been very public in her repugnance at the president's behavior, as have many of the people actually have signed this statement. ...
SIMON: And Professor Wilentz, what does the argument boil down to as far as historians are concerned? What do they see in the Constitution or in precedent that gives them caution about this?
WILENTZ: Well, what we see is that the current charges against President Clinton simply don't match what the founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, had in mind as grounds for impeachment.
When you go back and read the journals of the convention in 1787, it's very clear that the framers were talking about high crimes and misdemeanors, or crimes against the state. In this case, President Clinton's offenses, including possible illegalities, simply don't match that standard. ...
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
November 6, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: Briefs from York, State College and Milesburg
DATELINE: YORK, Pa.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) - Penn State's math department is one of six in the nation selected to become leading training centers for math scientists and engineers.
The university announced this week that its math department won a $2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to be used to improve the way math is taught. Penn State's contribution will bring the total funding to $3 million.
The five-year grant begins July 1. The other schools selected for the grants are the University of Colorado, Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Washington.
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
November 6, 1998, Friday, Home Edition
HEADLINE: MORE AID FOR RUSSIA REFORMS SEEN AS POLITICAL RISK;
ECONOMICS: THE WEST'S CONSENSUS ON HOW TO PROPEL MOSCOW'S TRANSITION TO FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM SHATTERS AMID TURMOIL AND CORRUPTION.
BYLINE: TYLER MARSHALL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
The turmoil in Russia's economy after years of Western-backed reform has so shaken the international development community that its entire approach to aiding Moscow has become an open question.
Amid signs that billions of dollars in international aid have been squandered in Russia, some experts in the private sector are questioning whether it is still politically possible for the United States and other Western governments to provide new public money to help underwrite Moscow's economic transition.
Equally significant, some believe that events in Russia signal a major blow to the "Washington consensus," a school of economic thought popular within the Clinton administration and international lending institutions based here. The approach calls on nascent free-market economies to allow capital to flow freely while reining in government spending and inflation.
The Russian government took these goals so seriously that it frequently stopped paying workers in order to meet them--one of several moves that eventually undermined popular support for reforms. What remained of that support unraveled in August after devaluation of the ruble and a freeze on foreign debt payments deepened the current economic crisis. ...
Stephen Kotkin, director of Russian studies at Princeton University, believes that the United States should continue to fund programs that keep Russia's nuclear arsenal secure and its scientists working. However, he argues, Washington should not back Russia's civilian reform efforts at all because of the endemic corruption.
"Congress won't swallow it, and people will get angry--and rightfully so," he said.
Kotkin contended that private, direct foreign investment--targeted at specific industries or regions and bypassing Moscow--offers the best chance because it could revive the country from the grass roots. Western industrialists invested in Josef Stalin's Soviet Union when there was money to be made, and they will do it again for the same reason, Kotkin said. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 6, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: Larry Ellis, Olympic Coach For U.S. Track, Dies at 70
BYLINE: By FRANK LITSKY
Larry Ellis, the head coach of the 1984 United States Olympic men's track and field team, the first African-American head coach in any Ivy League sport and the former president of track and field's national governing body, died Wednesday at his home in Skillman, N.J. He was 70.
He had been in good health since receiving a heart transplant in 1995. The cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, his daughter Joanne Glenn said. She said he had not felt well since returning Monday from Virginia, where he had given the eulogy at the funeral of an old friend.
For 13 years, Ellis coached at Jamaica High School in Queens, where his best athlete was Bob Beamon, a future Olympic champion and world record-holder in the long jump. Then, from 1970 to 1992, he coached the men's teams at Princeton -- outdoor and indoor track and field for the first 20 years and cross-country for 22 years.
Princeton competed in the Heptagonal League, which consists of the eight Ivy League colleges plus Army and Navy. Until Ellis arrived, Princeton had not won a Heptagonal team title since 1938 and had never won a Heptagonal cross-country title, but under his leadership it won 11 titles in track and eight in cross-country.
Ellis's best athlete at Princeton was Craig Masback, a world-class miler and now the chief executive officer of USA Track and Field, the national governing body. Ellis was the president of that organization from 1992 to 1996.
Ellis was dignified but with an active sense of fun. When he was elected Olympic coach, he once recalled, "I didn't jump up and down, but a little guy inside me jumped up and down." ...
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
November 5, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: Message of November Surprise
BYLINE: Linda Feldmann, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
HIGHLIGHT: Democratic gains temper impeachment ardor, leave Congress a House more divided.
Yes, the Republicans still control Capitol Hill. And yes, strictly local issues decided race after race this week.
But in Washington, where the political class has hung on every twist and turn of the Monica Lewinsky saga for months, the political landscape has been dramatically repainted.
The threat of impeachment hanging over President Clinton's head has begun to dissipate. Though most voters say their views on Mr. Clinton's sex scandal didn't affect how they voted, the impeachment issue still presented an important subtext to the campaign. ...
In gaining House seats - at least five - the Democrats bucked history, which has shown the presidential party typically losing seats in midterm elections. The Republicans also failed to add to their 55 to 45 majority in the Senate. In state legislatures, Democrats defied tradition, too, making gains in a branch of government that will control much of the redistricting process. And Democrats captured the biggest prize of the day, the California governorship, which gives the party a big boost when congressional districts are redrawn in 2001. ...
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: MR. EDWARDS GOES TO WASHINGTON: Democrat John Edwards (with wife, Elizabeth, left, and daughters) unseated North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth. Election '98 is seeing a number of new faces in government, including a former professional wrestler, a Princeton University physicist, and yet another son of former President Bush. BY KAREN TAM/AP
Copyright 1998 CHINA DAILY
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
November 5, 1998
HEADLINE: China- Bell Labs scientist wins Nobel prize
Murray Hill, New Jersey -- The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on October 13 to Horst Stormer, Adjunct Physics Director at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, and two former Bell Labs scientists, Robert C. Laughlin and Daniel C. Tsui, for their work in quantum physics.
They were cited for their discovery of the fractional quantum-hall effect, a new state of matter created when electrons come together to form quasi-particles with exact fractions of electrical charges. The experimental work was done at Bell Labs in the early 1980s; the theory was explained later by Laughlin, after he became a professor at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
Stormer, 49, is also a professor at Columbia University, in New York City, and Tsui is now professor at Princeton University, New Jersey. ...
Stormer and Tsui discovered the fractional quantum-hall effect, which occurs in a thin sheet of electrons inside a semiconductor, not unlike the electron sheet in a modern-day transistor. Under extreme conditions of temperature and magnetic field, the electron appears to break up into several identical pieces -- but this is due not to the disintegration of the electron, but to the motion of many electrons forming fractionally charged quasi-particles. ...
Copyright 1998 THE HINDU
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
November 5, 1998
HEADLINE: Regenerating brain cells
ONE of the most dearly-held tenets of human biology - that the human brain cannot replace neurons - has been proved wrong with the publication in Nature Medicine of a study showing that some human brain cells can regenerate. This exciting finding will shed new light on the natural ageing of the brain and on neuro- degenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease - all of which are characterised by a gradual loss of neurons.Led by Fred Gage, researchers at the Salk institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, found evidence of replication in cells from the dentate gyrus (an area of the brain involved in learning and memory) in five deceased cancer patients.
The patients, aged between 50 and 80, who were treated at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden, had received intravenous injections of a substance called bromodoexyuridine (BrdU) in order to check for tumour cell proliferation. BrdU is a compound that labels dividing cells by incorporating itself into newly synthesised DNA. When the brains of these BrdU-labelled patients came to post mortem, Gage's team took advantage of a rare opportunity to look for signs of cell division in the dentate gyrus. The researchers wished to follow up reports of the formation of new neurons - neurogenesis - in the corresponding part of the brain in rodents and monkeys. ...
Even so, "this is a thrilling discovery" says Professor Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University who earlier this year made a similar discovery in marmosets. "Now we can get on with finding out why these cells are regenerating, working out whether or not something similar is occurring in other brain regions and seeing how we can manipulate the process."
Dayton Daily News
Copyright 1998 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.
November 5, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: NEWSMAN STOSSEL BLASTS MEDIA
SUBHEAD: * He says his craft is often a government conduit for unnecessary scare stories.
BYLINE: Jim Bohman Dayton Daily News
ABC News correspondent John Stossel knows how to be provocative.
Stossel tells his audiences they will be happier and more productive if they drive 'government busybodies' out of their lives.
The crowd attending the Miami Valley Business to Business Trade Show on Wednesday at the Dayton Convention Center loved it.
Stossel, featured speaker for the trade show luncheon, blamed his own craft for much of the government's intrusiveness.
'All we hear from the news media are scare stories about awful things happening, about new toxic things we are exposed to, about radiation and chemicals,' he said. ...
Stossel, winner of 19 Emmy Awards, said the assignment needlessly scared people when statistics show flying is far safer than driving.
The journalist, who specializes in consumer stories, said too many scare stories have caused the Food and Drug Administration to be excessively careful in examining new pharmaceuticals. 'As a result, it takes $140 million and 10 years of testing before the FDA will approve a new drug,' he said. ...
'The free market does a better job than central planners,' said Stossel, a 1969 graduate of Princeton University with a degree in psychology.
However, he said the unfettered market does not work well enough to protect the environment. He said the Environmental Protection Agency must be preserved to prevent private business from polluting the air, the earth and waterways. He said there is too much incentive to dump wastes rather than deal with them properly.
SHOW: TODAY
NBC News Transcripts
Copyright 1998 National Broadcasting Co. Inc.
November 5, 1998
HEADLINE: REPRESENTATIVE JOHN KASICH DISCUSSES ELECTIONS AND HIS BOOK "COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS"
ANCHORS: MATT LAUER; KATIE COURIC
MATT LAUER, co-host:
One of the other names many people are tabbing as a potential GOP presidential contender is Ohio Congressman John Kasich, who has written a new book called "Courage Is Contagious."
Congressman, good morning. Nice to have you here.
Representative JOHN KASICH ("Courage Is Contagious"): Good to be here. ...
LAUER: Another story in the book called "You Don't Know How Much I Hate Drugs." It's about a woman named Jessica Hulsey. Tell me briefly about her.
Rep. KASICH: Mother and father heroin addicts when she was born. Her father is a crack cocaine addict today. Her mother has hepatitis C. Her two favorite uncles, one killed and one paralyzed in--in drug deals. She struggled and she said she used to read the book of Job, and that precious young lady has just graduated from Princeton University, and she's now working in the anti-drug programs.
LAUER: So what do you want people to take away from this book? What is the message?
Rep. KASICH: Matt, the message is every human being has a special gift and those gifts allow us to work together and be part of a mosaic to heal our country and heal the world, really. And so what we need to do is to don't think we can fix everything, but let's fix that that we can, and let's have courage. If we're a big time news anchor, then sometimes we got to do an interview that people don't want us to do. If we're--if we have the gift of compassion, we have to care. It means that we have to use whatever talents God has given us and be active and change the world in which we live. And together, we'll make a better world...
The Times
Copyright 1998 Times Newspapers Limited (London)
November 5, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: Love letters
BYLINE: Alex O'Connell
THE ARCHIVIST. By Martha Cooley. Abacus, Pounds 9.99 - ISBN 0 349 11096 4.
MATTHIAS oversees the Princeton University archives. Among the items there are the letters between T. S. Eliot and his unconsummated love, Emily Hale. Hale bequeathed these letters on condition that they be withheld from public view until 2020. Enter Roberta, a graduate student who - desperate to see the correspondence - forces him to confront his own Eliotic past. A novel set in academia might end up sounding like a lumpen undergraduate thesis. Instead, Martha Cooley has written a deeply moving debut about possession, connection and belonging to others.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 05, 1998, Thursday, Final Edition
HEADLINE: THE NEW GOVENORS
Thirteen new governors were elected in Tuesday's races -- five Democrats, seven Republicans and Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura. There now will be 31 GOP governors (a loss of one), 17 Democratic governors and two others.
OHIO
His great-grandfather was the nation's 27th president, his grandfather earned the name "Mr. Republican" and his father served in the Senate, but Robert A. Taft II became the first member of his family to be elected governor of Ohio.
Taft, 56, succeeds George V. Voinovich, who was elected to the Senate. Taft has served as Ohio secretary of state since 1990, after earlier being elected to the state legislature and serving as a county commissioner in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati. He is a graduate of Yale and Princeton universities and holds a law degree from the University of Cincinnati. He served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania and worked as the assistant director of the Illinois Bureau of the Budget.
Taft campaigned on improving education and health care and cutting crime. He branded a tax cut proposed by his Democratic opponent, former state attorney general Lee Fisher, a "risky scheme."
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 05, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: Fred Burton Smith Dies; General Counsel At Treasury During Johnson Administration
Fred Burton Smith, 83, general counsel of the Treasury Department during the Johnson administration, died of cardiac arrest Nov. 2 at a hospital in Greensboro, N.C. He had heart and lung ailments.
Mr. Smith lived in the Washington area from 1944 to 1969, when he retired from Treasury to teach at the Syracuse University law school.
He moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., in 1979.
He was a native of Syracuse, N.Y., and a graduate of Princeton University and the Syracuse law school. He began his 26-year career at Treasury in 1944 and was financial adviser to the Philippine government after World War II. ...
Asahi News Service
Copyright 1998 Asahi News Service
November 4, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: TIME TO HALT AND RECONSIDER THE NUCLEAR FUSION DREAM
Asahi Shimbun said in an editorial:
International research on nuclear fusion, expected to be the energy source for the 21st century, has hit an obstacle. The United States has pulled out from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.
Up until now, Japan, Russia, the European Union, and the United States were taking part in the project, which involved designing and engineering experiments.
The U.S. withdrawal came just after the final blueprints had been completed and a review of the earlier designs to halve the costs of construction, estimated at about 1 trillion yen ($8.7 billion), had begun.
Meeting in Yokohama recently, officials of the four parties to ITER affirmed that design work should be continued for three more years, even without American involvement.
The question is whether Japan, the EU and Russia alone should start construction on the experimental reactor. ...
The United States seems to have given up on nuclear fusion for the time being. The operation of experimental equipment at Princeton University, the largest of its kind in that country, has been halted, and only lesser-sized equipment is kept in operation for basic experiments. ...
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
November 4, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: A scientist prepares for Congress, while an ousted incumbent rests
BYLINE: By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.
Robert Saxon sees cinematic parallels in scientist Rush Holt, New Jersey's newest congressman and one of only six challengers nationwide who succeeded in ousting an incumbent on Tuesday.
"He's remarkably reminiscent of Mr. Smith," Saxon said, referring to the classic Jimmy Stewart movie, "and I hope he goes to Washington and achieves as much as the fictitious Mr. Smith, only for real."
Mr. Holt goes to Washington in January, but the Democrat spent Wednesday afternoon on a busy street near Princeton University shaking hands and thanking voters like Saxon.
The man Holt defeated, freshman Republican Rep. Mike Pappas of Rocky Hill, spent the day meeting privately with supporters and contemplating his next step.
Until devoting himself full-time to this year's run for Congress, Holt was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the nation's premiere institute for the study of fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars. Holt's father, also named Rush Holt, was a U.S. senator from West Virginia from 1935 to 1941. ...
The Herald-Sun
Copyright 1998 The Durham Herald Co. (Durham, N.C.)
November 04, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: Obituaries
SMITH
CHAPEL HILL -- Chapel Hill resident Fred Burton Smith, 83, general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department during the Johnson administration, died of cardiac arrest Nov. 2 in Greensboro.
Mr. Smith was born in Syracuse, N.Y. and after graduating from Princeton University and Syracuse University Law School, he moved to Washington in 1944. He held several posts during 25 years with the Treasury, among them financial adviser to the Philippine's postwar government and deputy general counsel. He was the author of books and articles on international monetary policy and trade and received numerous awards for outstanding public service. ...
The Irish Times
Copyright 1998 The Irish Times
November 4, 1998
HEADLINE: The silent holocaust
Imperialism lives, writes John Pilger, perhaps the world's best known campaigning journalist. He takes the West to task over its attitude to countries it regards as opposing its interests
On the brink of the 21st century, the UN draws its authority and credibility from the "international community". What is this grand amorphous state?
In reality, it is not "international" at all; it is the Western establishment, whose will is sometimes expressed through the Security Council, at other times through NATO, generally unilaterally. At all times it is dominated by the US. It is a new order with an old meaning: imperialism.
It is, of course, apostasy in the West to describe the US and its principal lieutenant, Britain, as imperialist. Surely, imperialism died at Suez in 1956?
From the invasion of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to the invasions of Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Gulf, to the current genocidal blockade of Iraq, all of them authorised or condoned directly or indirectly by the UN, the evidence is that imperialism lives on - the difference today is its presentation.
There are serious blueprints at hand for this "new" imperialism. The most famous and influential is the work of Professor Samuel Huntington, director of Harvard's Institute of Strategic Studies.
Called The Clash of Civilisations, it has been hailed as a 1990s equivalent of George F Kennan's historic essay on "containment", which rationalised American imperial supremacy following the second World War.
Huntington's argument is that Western culture must be preserved in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity in order to "generate a third Euro-American phase of Western affluence." He wrote: "The leaders of Western countries have instituted patterns of trust and co-operation among themselves that, with rare exceptions, they do not have with the leaders of other societies." ...
No fuss is made about the Middle East's only genuine nuclear-armed power, whose murderous invasions of a neighbouring country, all of them in violation of at least six UN resolutions and overwhelmingly condemned by the General Assembly, have been carried out with impunity. This is Israel, whose terrorism, known as "self defence", is underwritten by the US.
In the new imperialist order, the victims, not the oppressors, are the terrorists: a perception widely held, according to professor Richard Falk at Princeton University, because of "the domination of fact by image in shaping and shading the dissemination of images that control the public perception of reality.
"Even critics on the left generally started from the prefabricated association of terrorism with the politics of the dispossessed, and try from that vantage point to explain and argue why such patterns of violence have emerged." ...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Copyright 1998 P.G. Publishing Co.
November 4, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: THE ESSENCE OF PERFECTION
BYLINE: L.A. JOHNSON, POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITER
When Jacquelyn Smith read about a Mr. Right contest, she had to enter. She surely thought she could describe her perfect man in 75 words or less for a chance at $1,000. She wanted the cash. She wanted her words to offset some of the negative images of black men in the media and popular culture. She wanted to help out the men, too.
"You know how men say, ' We don't know what women want, what they think?' " Smith, 37, of Swissvale said. "I figured, ' Hey, let 'em know.' "
Smith and two other Pittsburgh women extol the virtues of their ideal men in "All the Man I Need: Black Women's Loving Expressions on the Men They Desire," by Anaezi Modu and Andrea Walker (Gateway, $15.95).
"We're always hearing what men want. You pick up any magazine and it's, again, what a man wants from a woman," said Walker, an attorney from Newark, NJ. "We're not frequently seeing what women want. Who is Mr. Right?"
Almost 2,000 Essence magazine readers, black women ages 16 to 72 in 40 states, responded to the question "How would you describe your ideal man?" posed in a tiny advertisement in the back of the magazine last fall. The authors posed the same question to American Woman magazine readers, most of whom are white. A little more than 200 women responded.
That's when the co-authors, who met during their undergraduate days at Princeton University, decided to set aside the American Woman magazine data, and cull through the Essence readers' responses to create the book. About 350 of the 2,000 entries were used. Initially, they planned to read the women's responses and summarize them in a book. ...
The Record
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. (Bergen County, NJ)
November 4, 1998
HEADLINE: N.J. VOTERS KEEP ALL BUT ONE MEMBER IN HOUSE
NO MESSAGE ON CLINTON SCANDAL
BYLINE: HERB JACKSON, Staff Writer
A singing tribute to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr cost Rep. Michael Pappas a second term in Congress on Tuesday, as the Somerset County conservative became the only House incumbent defeated in New Jersey.
Democrat Rush Holt, a Princeton University physicist, attacked Pappas in radio and TV ads that featured the GOP congressman singing a nursery rhyme on the House floor in August that began"Twinkle, twinkle Kenneth Starr, now we see how brave you are." ...
The Spokesman-Review
Copyright 1998 Spokane Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA)
November 4, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: IT WAS ACADEMIC: SALTERS A NATURAL FOR THE IVY LEAGUE
BYLINE: John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review
For Jim Salters, the decision four years ago to play his college football at an Ivy League school was a no-brainer.
Uh, maybe we should rephrase that.
After all, you have to make 1,400 on the college boards for the Ivies to waste a stamp telling you they don't want you.
But during recruiting his senior year at Gonzaga Prep, it became obvious to Salters that the messages from Princeton and Dartmouth clearly outnumbered those from Stanford and USC - something like a whole lot to none at all. ...
Or Princeton Stadium, now that they've leveled storied Palmer Stadium - for 82 years the home of Tigers football - where Jesse Owens still had the record for the long jump when the bulldozers were sent in.
Jim Salters played in the last of 461 games at Palmer and the first one at the new joint. He has a championship ring from his freshman year ''when I didn't even dress for home games'' and is hoping to add another this season - his third as a starting linebacker.
It's more than just hope: The Tigers are locked in a three-way tie atop the Ivy with three games to play. ...
Agence France Presse
Copyright 1998 Agence France Presse
November 03, 1998
HEADLINE: Murdoch heir to marry Australian supermodel
DATELINE: (Picture)
SYDNEY, Nov 4 (AFP) - Lachlan Murdoch, eldest son of media magnate Rupert Murdoch, will marry Australian supermodel Sarah O'Hare, his girlfriend of nine months, next year.
The chairman and chief executive of News Ltd popped the question to 26-year-old O'Hare over dinner on Monday night at a Melbourne restaurant. ...
Murdoch, 27, was regarded as one of the world's most eligible bachelors while O'Hare is Australia's most famous model after Elle Macpherson, having won a major contract to model Wonderbra.
She is currently plastered over American fashion magazines and lives in New York but also has a home in Sydney. ...
Lachlan has been groomed for News Corp's top job since his university years.
He was educated at Princeton University in the United States where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy in 1994. ...
M2 PRESSWIRE
Copyright 1998 M2 Communications Ltd.
November 3, 1998
HEADLINE: THE WHITE HOUSE
President Clinton names Members of the Commission on Drug-free Communities
The President today announced his intent to appoint the members of the Commission on Drug-Free Communities: Marilyn Culp, Thomas Dortch, Ruby Hearn, Jessica Hulsey, Scott King, Charles Larson, Henry Lozano, Claire McCaskill, Mary Ann Solberg, Carol Stone, and Hope Taft.
The Commission on Drug-Free Communities will advise the President and the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) on programs created by the act and the distribution of grants to community organizations. The Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Barry R. McCaffrey, will oversee the commission. ...
Ms. Jessica M. Hulsey, of Buena Park, California, has been nationally recognized for her drug prevention work. Affected by the prevalence of addiction in her family, she has long been active in the substance abuse prevention field. She has spoken to scores of high school and junior high students about substance use and devoted much time to community coalitions. She is a former board member of Drug Use Is Life Abuse in Orange County, California, and organized a drug prevention and mentoring program for Corner House in Princeton, New Jersey while attending Princeton University. Ms. Hulsey was a presenter at the 1997 President's Summit for America's Future in Philadelphia. After graduating from Princeton in 1998, she began work as Director of Training and Technology at Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA).
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Copyright 1998 Orange County Register
November 3, 1998 Tuesday
HEADLINE: New type of birth control in demand;
MEDICINE: Requests for Preven, taken after unprotected sex, are up 70 percent.
BYLINE: DEBRA GORDON, The Orange County Register
A secret that few doctors share with women is a secret no more.
Requests for "emergency contraception" _ used to prevent a pregnancy after unprotected sex _ are up 70 percent over this time last year at Planned Parenthood clinics, said spokeswoman Sandy Hester.
Nearly 240 women a month in Orange County are asking for prescriptions.
An intense media blitz the past year and the Food and Drug Administration's September approval of the first emergency contraception kit, Preven, probably fueled the local awareness, said James Trussell of Princeton University.
Increases have also been reported in other markets targeted by the blitz, Trussel said, but no comprehensive national figures are available. ...
Crain's Chicago Business
Copyright 1998 Crain Communications Inc.
November 02, 1998
HEADLINE: 40 UNDER 40: PROFILES, PART 3
Shadi Bartsch 32
Professor of classics
University of Chicago
University of Chicago classics professor Shadi Bartsch has accomplished much in her short but distinguished academic career, including finding the elusive connection between ancient Rome and real imitation cheese.
In the epilogue to her third published work, a reading of Lucan's ''Civil War,'' Ms. Bartsch argues that the Romans had ''a culture of simulation'' in which appearances were considered more important than people's genuine personalities. She posits a parallel to our postmodern society, with its real imitation cheese and greeting cards that feature ''spontaneous feelings.''
Sincerity is little more than a useful concept. ''Just look at politicians giving apologies,'' she says.
Ms. Bartsch came to Chicago's monastic campus from an assistant professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her doctorate five years after graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University. Born in London, she's lived in Iran, Switzerland, the Fiji Islands and Indonesia.
Her writings attracted the attention of the U of C's dean of humanities, Philip Gossett, who was conducting a nationwide search for a classics professor. Many applied, says Mr. Gossett, ''but Shadi was just brimming with ideas.''
After a brief stint as a visiting lecturer, she became one of the U of C's youngest tenured professors. ...
M2 PRESSWIRE
Copyright 1998 M2 Communications Ltd.
November 2, 1998
Concept of de-alerting of nuclear weapons discussed by Disarmament Symposium at headquarters
NEW YORK (Department for Disarmament Affairs) - Disarmament week, which concludes today, was inaugurated on 26 October by the Department for Disarmament Affairs with a Symposium on the de-alerting of nuclear weapons. The Symposium, which was informal, was open to members of permanent missions to the United Nations and representatives of interested organizations. It was held at the Dag Hammarskjld Library Auditorium.
The Symposium was moderated by Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala, who, in his opening remarks, noted that the concept of de-alerting, though an important step to reduce dramatically the chance of an accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons, is just beginning to find its place on the international disarmament agenda. He also noted that the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) had devoted a recent issue of its newsletter to the subject.
The Symposium consisted of presentations by four keynote speakers, who spoke in their personal capacity: Bruce Blair, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies Department of the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.; Guennadi Yevstafiev, Consultant to the National Security Council of the Russian Federation; and M. V. Ramana and Zia Mian, both Research Associates at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies of Princeton University. ...
The Record
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. (Bergen County, NJ)
November 2, 1998; MONDAY; ALL EDITIONS
HEADLINE: WHAT COMES AFTER A NOBEL? HUMILITY
SERIES: DISPATCHES
BYLINE: MIKE KELLY, Staff Writer
DATELINE: PRINCETON
You labor in solitude, entombed by the lonely, gray fluorescence of a science lab and then, SURPRISE!, the academic spotlight finds you and you're famous.
The phone rings and a voice tells you that you've just won a Nobel Prize.
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. knows the feeling. He knows the inevitable
question, too:"So, Joe, what do you do for an encore?" Five years ago, Taylor, a lanky, bespectacled physics professor who looks like he could pass for Mr. Chips, won a Nobel Prize in physics.
But even among lofty Nobels, this was no small feat. All Taylor and research physicist Russell A. Hulse did was discover the first binary pulsar system of two collapsed neutron stars in a dark corner of the universe and prove that Albert Einstein was right about the nature of energy and his theory of relativity.
"It was," said Taylor in a matter-of-fact tone,"sort of a pinnacle."
As for changing his life that much though, Taylor pauses at the question and the possibilities it conjures up.
No, he explains, life is still pretty much the same after winning the Nobel, relatively speaking. He does, however, point to one small change, a reminder of what he spotted out there in the universe."I do wear a Pulsar watch,"he says with a laugh. ...
Time
Copyright 1998 The Time Inc. Magazine Company
November 2, 1998
HEADLINE: Enough About Slavery; Let's work on racial problems in the here and now
BYLINE: Jack E. White
Like most African Americans, I have the legacy of slavery written all over my face. My brow, for example, resembles that of my father's father, who was born a slave in northern Florida. The sponsor's slogan for the powerful series Africans in America, which aired on PBS last week, rightly insisted that the story of slavery is not just African-American history but American history. But for blacks like me, it's also family history, a link to the oppressive past so intense and personal that it stares back whenever we look in a mirror.
That may be why I wasn't moved more by the PBS series and Beloved, Oprah Winfrey's movie version of Toni Morrison's soul-searing novel. Both productions were excellent, but it's not exactly news that slavery was a horrible crime. I wish we could throw as much energy and emotion into solving the gritty racial problems that we face today as we pour into condemning the sins of the past.
For instance, in the tangled debate over affirmative action, both sides too often assume that the rationale for efforts to get blacks a fair share of jobs, government contracts and slots in elite universities is to make up for historic oppression. But that is preposterous. We don't need affirmative action because our ancestors were slaves; we need it because so many of us are still being denied opportunities because of our race.
As former Princeton University president William G. Bowen and former Harvard University president Derek Bok argue in their new book, The Shape of the River, a major justification for making sure that promising minority students can get into the best universities, even if their SAT scores are lower than those of some white applicants, is that "American society needs the high-achieving black graduates who will provide leadership in every walk of life." In other words, to make sure that our future is shaped by all our citizens, not just a few. Slavery has nothing to do with it. ...
Aerospace America
Copyright 1998 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.;
November, 1998
HEADLINE: With Carl Pilcher
BYLINE: Interview by Johan Benson
Carl B. Pilcher is the science program director for solar system exploration at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. As a member of the Office of Space Science board of directors, he is responsible for overall management, budget, and strategic planning for the solar system exploration programs, including the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn, NASA's low-cost Discovery missions, and several upcoming missions to Mars. ...
He received degrees in chemistry from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1968, and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1973. He also earned a master of public affairs degree in international relations from Princeton University in 1987.
Q: NASA has finished the preliminary reconnaissance of the major bodies of the solar system except Pluto, and has sent missions to comets and asteroids. What goals and strategies is NASA using in the next phase of its exploration?
A: NASA has worked with the scientific community to identify fundamental questions and science goals for exploration of the solar system that are published in our strategic plan. Fundamentally, we're trying to answer basic questions, such as: What is the origin and history of our solar system? How did it come to be the way it is? Is there life anywhere other than Earth? Did life ever arise on Mars? Is there an ocean under the ice on Jupiter's moon, Europa, and if so, did life evolve there? Are there other potential habitats for life elsewhere in the solar system? There are many fundamental questions we are seeking to answer with our next missions. ...
Q: The Mars Global Surveyor mission is in orbit, mapping the entire planet. It is showing some spectacular data indicating that Mars is very similar to Earth in many ways.
A: We also have the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous [NEAR] mission, which has already flown past the asteroid Mathilde and returned some very exciting data showing an object of very low density with large impact craters. It is a mystery how the asteroid could have received such impacts without shattering. Understanding how this happened could provide very important information for understanding the nature of these bodies and for what you would have to do if you ever found one on a collision course with Earth. In February, NEAR will go into orbit around the asteroid Eros and make observations. It will be the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.
Astronomy
Copyright 1998 Kalmbach Publishing Company
November, 1998HEADLINE: Souped-up supernova: hypernovae may spark gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray bursts have left astronomers scratching their heads ever since they were discovered by U.S. military satellites in the late 1960s. Part of the mystery was solved last year when astronomers found that these bursts emanate from galaxies billions of light-years away. But what exactly triggers these explosions, which can release 1,000 times more radiation than supernovae? A gamma-ray burst and a supernova recently flared from the same patch of sky, strongly suggesting that at least some gamma-ray bursts are triggered by stellar explosions. "This could be the missing link between supernovae and gamma-ray bursts" says astrophysicist Stan Woosley of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
On April 25, two satellites, BeppoSAX and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, detected the gamma-ray burst in the southern constellation Telescopium. On May 2, Dutch astronomers spotted Supernova 1998bw flaring in a spiral arm of a galaxy 120 million light-years away, in the same area as the April 25 burst. "The probability of a chance coincidence between the gamma-ray burst and Supernova 1998bw is well below one in ten thousand," says Princeton University astronomer Bohdan Paczynski.
Supernova 1998bw is perhaps the most peculiar supernova ever seen. Astronomers were startled by radio observations showing material racing outward at nearly the speed of light, suggesting an explosion much more powerful than most supernovae.
Perhaps this event was a "hypernova"-- a term Paczynski coined in 1997 to describe stellar explosions 100 times more powerful than supernovae. While nobody knows exactly how a hypernova would work, Woosley has published a theoretical model in which a massive, rapidly rotating star collapses at the end of its life to form a black hole. The black hole voraciously accretes matter from a surrounding disk, powering twin, high-speed jets that slam into surrounding interstellar gas and generate a gamma-ray burst. ...
Astronomy
Copyright 1998 Kalmbach Publishing Company
November, 1998
HEADLINE: Exploding stars tell all: distant supernovae hint that the universe will expand forever - and at an ever increasing rate; includes related article
BYLINE: Irion, Robert
Distant supernovae hint that the universe will expand forever -- and at an ever increasing rate.
For sheer explosive spectacle, few events rival supernovae. These titanic bursts of light pierce the cosmos, blazing so brightly that telescopes halfway across the universe can detect them. Now, two teams of astronomers are using these beacons in a most surprising fashion: as probes of how the expansion of the universe has changed.
Their preliminary answers, reported early this year, should delight the existentialists among us. It appears there's not enough mass in the universe to prevent it from expanding forever into a cold, bleak future -- indeed, not even close. Further, evidence is mounting that a "cosmological constant" is at work, accelerating the growth of the universe via a repulsion of space so bizarre that Albert Einstein derided its appearance in his equations as his greatest blunder. ...
Many questions remain, but astronomers agree that supernovae have become a promising means to gauge our ultimate fate. "Measuring these cosmological parameters ties us to questions that go back thousands of years," says astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), leader of the group that pioneered this method. "It's so rare to get at these numbers with such a straightforward, elegant technique. This is an incredibly exciting project."
Perlmutter talks about his endeavor with supernova-caliber energy, darting across an office that overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge miles to the west. The project, he says, is a curious hybrid of classical astronomy and modern physics. Its goal -- to ascertain the curvature of space -- recalls Edwin Hubble's pioneering work in the 1930s. However, the research smacks of particle physics: large collaborations (more than 20 scientists on each team), a reliance on automated analysis, and an approach that discards almost all the collected data to expose hidden events. It's no accident that many in Perlmutter's group were trained as physicists -- and it helps explain why it took the better part of a decade to prove the concept.
But by now, Perlmutter and his competitors -- a consortium headed by astronomer Brian Schmidt of the Mt. Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatory in Australia -- have done just that. "I'm deeply impressed," says cosmologist P. J. E. Peebles of Princeton University. "It's a great triumph, and Saul deserves a lot of credit for pushing it forward." Nonetheless, Peebles thinks the rivalry has led to hasty public notices. "I depreciate this announcement that we've discovered how the world will end," he says. "I don't think we know. And it's a little embarrassing at this stage to say that we do." ...
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
November 1, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: Is what you see what you get?
BYLINE: By Jill Zuckman, Globe Staff
If Abraham Lincoln were running for president today, he might have a tough time getting elected. Too tall, a bit on the homely side, and unfamiliar with television, Lincoln also was given to lengthy speechmaking rather than succinct sound bites.
In 1860, of course, such limitations were of little consequence. Lincoln not only won election, but also went on to become a great chief executive, historians agree.
So what about today? Should voters, who go - or won't go - to the polls Tuesday, think that a candidate's prowess on the stump offers clues to what kind of leader he or she might be, once in office? Does a good campaigner automatically make a good leader?
Those who study such questions say the short answer is "no." Winning votes and doing well once in office require vastly different skills. ...
Some of the best retail politicians - good at pressing the flesh, good at winning over voters, great at sharing a vision - choke once they get into office. "We tend to select people based on being pure campaigners," says Fred I. Greenstein at Princeton University, a specialist on the presidency. "Then they get there and they don't know what to do."
He points to Presidents Kennedy and Clinton as examples of excellent campaigners who bungled the job at the first opportunity. Kennedy, who was not known for any big accomplishments in the US Senate or, before that, the House of Representatives, was elected president in 1960 and almost immediately found himself mired in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Clinton, elected in 1992, quickly botched his promise to end discrimination against gays in the military, angering gay supporters, the military, and the public at large. ...
Copyright 1998 THE HINDU
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
November 1, 1998
HEADLINE: Random Notes
Ibid., opcit
AND now there is an entire book on footnotes, that smallprint which scholars find so irresistible and readers so irritatingly distracting. Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton University, has decided to take the footnotes out of their marginal existence and made them the subject of the main text in a book with the plain title The Footnote (Faber and Faber (5.90). The professor himself, though, uses plenty of footnotes to illuminate his story.
The book is in defence of footnotes saying they are as important for a historian as a laboratory notebook or scientific data is for a scientist. They offer empirical support for a historian's argument in the same way as scientific data does for a scientist's hypothesis. "Without them, historical theses can be admired or resented, but they cannot be verified or disproved. As a basic professional and intellectual practice, they deserve the same sort of scrutiny that laboratory notebooks and scientific articles have long received from historians of science," he says in a preface to the book.
Grafton traces the history of the footnote which is variously placed in the 12th, the 17th, the 18th and the 19th Centuries "never without good reason"; and locates its golden moment in the 18th Century. It achieved its heights in the 18th Century when it became nearly a "literary art" form, and its best example is Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. " ... nothing in that work did more than its footnotes to amuse his friends or enrage his (Gibbon's) enemies," he says.
For all its breeziness, and contrary to what some blurbs suggest, it is a scholarly work and Grafton's verdict - backed by enough footnotes - is that footnoting is serious business which a scholar can ignore only at the cost of his own credibility. For the footnote-weary, there is no light at the end of Grafton's tunnel and the message is very clear: you can't get away from it.
Ebony
Copyright 1998 Johnson Publishing Company, Inc.
November, 1998
HEADLINE: Oprah & Danny Sizzle In Her First Love Scenes In The Powerful Film 'BELOVED'
BYLINE: By Laura B. Randolph
THE first time I saw it, I thought they were going to have to carry me out," Oprah Winfrey says of Beloved, the film based on Toni Morrison's unforgettable Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in which Oprah stars as Sethe, a mother who is haunted by the daughter she killed to keep her from being a slave. "Every single image caused such intense, deeply-felt emotions."
Even now, almost a year after the film's last scene was shot, neither Oprah nor her co-star, Danny Glover, can talk about the movie without those emotions riding close to the surface, without, as Glover puts it, "something burning within." ...
GRAPHIC: ... Nobel Prize-winning laureate Toni Morrison, professor of humanities at Princeton University, wrote the novel on which the movie is based. She joins Winfrey and other guests to discuss her book during a meeting of "Oprah's Book Club."
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 1, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: To Russia, Without Love
BYLINE: By Ken Kalfus; Ken Kalfus is the author of "Thirst," a collection of short stories.
THE LADIES FROM ST. PETERSBURG
Three Novellas. By Nina Berberova.
Translated by Marian Schwartz.
122 pp. New York:
New Directions. $19.95.
THE title novella in this slender collection ends with two words: "Oh, Russia!" It takes only 45 pages to get to this sigh, an expedited journey that would normally take despairing Russian writers (Gogol, for example) hundreds more. For this we may credit the lucidity of Nina Berberova's prose and the deftness of her characterizations, qualities that are evident throughout her work.
Berberova, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1901 and fled Russia in 1922, is best known in America for her autobiography, "The Italics Are Mine" (1969). She went on to have three volumes of her fiction published in English (much more of her work has appeared in French) before she died in 1993, a professor emeritus at Princeton University. "The Ladies from St. Petersburg" is the fourth book of her work to be translated.
Closely similar in theme and story line, two of these three novellas were first published in Paris in 1927. In each, a well-to-do Russian woman on the run from revolutionary turmoil falls ill among unsympathetic countrymen. Berberova's characters prove themselves to be vain and small-minded, even selfish and cruel. "Oh, Russia!" is pronounced dry-eyed. The author never romanticizes her homeland. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
November 1, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: ECONOMIC VIEW: Sure, Banks Are Lending, But Will They Keep It Up?
BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE
AS everyone surely knows by now, the global financial crisis has frightened lenders, making them very reluctant to buy corporate America's I.O.U.'s. Unless a company is among the elite -- an I.B.M. or a General Electric or an AT&T -- borrowing money has become an ordeal.
Such tightfistedness on the part of lenders can dry up economic activity. Companies borrow, for example, to buy new machinery and computers, and then pay off the debt from revenue the new equipment produces. Or they stockpile raw materials and finished merchandise, and repay the debt as the goods are sold. Shrink such activity long enough and a recession could ensue.
So it comes as pleasant news that banks are not pulling back in their lending to large corporations as other lenders are -- in fact, they are lending more, partly offsetting the pullback by the others. These other "lenders" are the mutual funds, the pension funds, the insurance companies, the Wall Street investment houses and the wealthy individuals who usually buy corporate I.O.U.'s, in the form of long-term bonds and short-term commercial paper issued by the nation's large companies. Lately, scared by the world financial turmoil, these investors have been sticking to risk-free Treasury securities instead. ...
Still, the rise in bank lending "is somewhat alleviating what would otherwise be a severe credit crunch, and the question is, How long will it keep doing that?" said Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist. ...
The News and Observer
Copyright 1998 The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
November 1, 1998 Sunday
HEADLINE: Double identity
BYLINE: NELL IRVIN PAINTER
Deborah Gray White's splendid new study is the rarest of works: a broad and sweeping history that becomes an intensely personal experience for the reader.
As I read "Too Heavy A Load's" accounts of the tension so many of my predecessors have felt between their race and their gender, I was reminded of how often I have been asked whether I consider myself an African-American or a woman.
The answer, always, was "both." I'd have to explain that, like every other American - like every other person in the universe - I live my life as a whole person, experiencing my race and gender simultaneously. In our label-addicted world it might prove convenient if I could divide my body and soul along some dotted line of sex or race. But such a division isn't possible.
I have much in common with white women and share a great deal with black men. Depending on the situation, I can feel drawn more toward one group or the other. ...
One of the great beauties of "Too Heavy A Load" is its depiction of black women both as members of various groups and as individuals.
The Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 severely tested black women's ability to hold together the two main constituents of our identity, because race loyalty to Thomas pulled in one way, while gender loyalty to Hill pulled in the opposite direction. Fittingly, this is where Deborah Gray White, a professor of history at Rutgers University, begins her historical tour de force in a preface called "Divided Against Myself." Fine historian that she is, White demonstrates how the long history of African-American women informed the tensions she felt in 1991. Over the course of her investigation she finds that this history of tension, while frustrating, makes a great deal of sense, because black women have found it difficult to satisfy the demands of race, class and gender all at the same time. ...
Nell Irvin Painter is a Professor of History at Princeton University. Her most recent book is "Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol."
Reason
Copyright 1998 Reason Foundation
November, 1998
HEADLINE: Serving the president: when must a president obey a subpoena?
BYLINE: Whittington, Keith E.
Long after the tawdriness that has become the Clinton administration is forgotten, the effects of the Lewinsky episode on the presidency will still be felt. In his "war" against Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, the president has deployed every available weapon. A variety of presidential privileges have been dusted off or made up - from privileges of communications with government lawyers or political advisers to privileges preventing Secret Service agents from testifying about what they have witnessed while on duty. The shame is not that the courts have uniformly rejected these claims but that they were litigated in the first place.
One significant issue remains unsettled: whether a president is legally obligated to comply with a subpoena. Although it appears that this question will not be answered during the Clinton presidency, current events suggest that the issue will eventually have to be resolved. In 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, but the Court has not yet required a president to testify in a civil or criminal proceeding. By reaching a voluntary arrangement with the president to testify before the Whitewater grand jury, Starr avoided lengthy litigation, and Clinton avoided another potentially embarassing legal defeat. Starr seemed hesitant to strip away this last vestige of presidential cover, and rightly so. The president's duty to comply with a subpoena raises tricky constitutional issues. As a nation we would be better off if the question were not settled in court. ...
There are strong constitutional arguments on both sides of this issue. Since a refusal by the nation's chief law enforcement officer to obey a court order is deeply troubling, those who value the rule of law might argue that a president should comply with any subpoena. Claiming that the president is not required to obey normal judicial procedures smells suspiciously like the kind of monarchical privilege the Founders rejected. ...
Yet federal prosecutors aren't the only persons who may wish to subpoena a president. As a defendant in a treason trial in 1807, Aaron Burr prevailed on Chief Justice John Marshall to subpoena President Jefferson to turn over relevant correspondence. When Jefferson refused to fully comply, the Court backed off, leaving the issue unsettled. The trial pitted Jefferson against two political enemies, Burr and Marshall, so there was room for cries of partisanship on both sides. ...
Keith E. Whittington (kewhitt@princeton. edu) is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University and author of Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning, to be published by Harvard University Press in the spring.
The Record
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. (Bergen County, NJ)
November 1, 1998; SUNDAY
HEADLINE: COLLEGES LOOK FOR ON-LINE APPLICANTS
BYLINE: The Associated Press
DATELINE: PRINCETON
Students worried about postmark deadlines and mailing costs now have another option when it comes to applying to Princeton University's graduate school, the Internet.
School officials says Princeton is one of the few graduate schools across the country that lets students apply on line, and that could lead to an increase in the number of applicants, The Times of Trenton reported for Saturday's editions.
"I think we're going to see a big change in our workload," said Barbara Basel, Princeton's manager of graduate admission.
The school began offering the on line option Sept. 24, and about 1,000 people have begun applying since then. The graduate school typically processes about 5,000 applications a year.
While Princeton may be among the first, it won't be the only school accepting applications from cyberspace. Rutgers University plans to allow on line graduate applications by spring.
Across the country, most undergraduate colleges offer or are planning to offer on line applications. Admissions directors say the pool is small, but growing.
Princeton doesn't offer on line undergraduate applications, but Rutgers does. Last year, more than 2,100 students applied on line, accounting for 6.5 percent of all applications, officials said. ...
Sacramento Bee
Copyright 1998 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
November 1, 1998
HEADLINE: PETRIE INSISTS CARRIL'S RETURN WAS MORE THAN CONTRACTUAL
BYLINE: Martin McNeal, Bee Staff Writer
Amid an offseason filled with coaching upheavals and labor problems, Pete Carril stands alone, secure, employed, ready to serve the Kings.
And that's the mystery. As the Kings wait for the NBA lockout to end, as they rebuild their coaching staff, only Carril remains from Eddie Jordan's bench crew.
Carril's survival has surprised the players who will fill most of the roster spots on the next Kings squad. The players know he has a close relationship with Kings vice president Geoff Petrie, a relationship dating to Petrie's days as a player at Princeton University under Carril.
Carril has outlasted two Kings head coaches, Garry St. Jean and Jordan.
Of all the Kings, free-agent forward Corliss Williamson probably benefited most from Carril's presence. Yet Williamson admitted he was surprised that Carril was not fired with Jordan and assistant Mike Bratz in August.
"You figure that if they were cleaning house, they'd clean the whole thing," Williamson said. "It was kind of surprising. . . but if you look at the fact that Geoff played under him, it gives you reason to think that he'd be back." ...
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
November 01, 1998
HEADLINE: I-200: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TUG OF WAR -- SEPARATING FACT FROM FICTION ON THIS MISLEADING MEASURE
BYLINE: JONI BALTER; TIMES EDITORIAL COLUMNIST
BY NOW, the reader, the viewer and most everyone else has Initiative-200 Fatigue. The long-winded experts have opined. The TV scare ads, delivered in deep Darth Vader tones, have frightened. The lies and misinformation have swirled like the wind in a November storm. Only two days remain until election day. Only 48 hours to inject some truth into the mile-high pile of myths surrounding this misleading initiative, which could abolish all public affirmative-action programs in Washington. Let's work through these fictions one at a time. ...
Myth: Affirmative action means unqualified minorities go to college and waste the opportunity.
Fact: Blacks admitted to 28 selective colleges and universities arrive with lower grades and test scores than whites. During college, they get lower grades and graduate at lower rates. But something important happens afterward. After graduation, blacks earn advanced degrees at rates similar to white classmates. They are more likely than whites to get professional degrees in law, medicine and business. And, according to exhaustive research by Derek Bok and William Bowen, former presidents of Harvard and Princeton Universities, blacks are more likely to get involved in community activities. These students form the backbone of the black middle class. ...
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
November 01, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH
BYLINE: PAUL ANDREWS; SEATTLE TIMES STAFF REPORTER
They're partners one day, bitter rivals the next. In Silicon Valley deals, ethics and memories change as fast as the technology.
Who is telling the truth and who is lying in the war of memos, e-mail and selective memory being conducted in federal court between Microsoft and the Department of Justice? Netscape co-founder Jim Clark says he wanted to partner with Microsoft and never saw much revenue potential for the browser business. Netscape Chief Executive Jim Barksdale, asked if Clark is a truthful man, dodges the question by calling him "a salesman."
America Online, with much fanfare, selects Microsoft as its browser of choice. Why? Because its technology is better. That was in March 1996.Now company executive David Colburn says the decision came because Microsoft twisted AOL's arm to "screw Netscape." ...
So who's telling the truth, and when are they telling it? ...
Case 2: Sun Microsystems
Netscape was not the only Silicon Valley powerhouse to seek out Microsoft's company. By the fall of 1995, Sun Microsystems was in licensing talks with Microsoft executives over key Internet technologies.
Sun's chief technology officer, Eric Schmidt, had contacted Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold during a conference at Princeton University, where both had attended school. Schmidt proposed licensing Java to Microsoft for use in its Internet Explorer browser. A new programming language, Java was hailed by some as a successor on the Internet to Windows.
Sun wanted to have as broad distribution for Java as possible and saw Netscape's browser and Microsoft's Windows as prime vehicles.
The two companies conducted rapid-fire negotiations. At the Dec. 7, 1995, briefing, they announced a deal for Java. The move was greeted with shock and consternation by many industry observers, who deemed it unthinkable that the two archrivals would ever enter a high-profile partnership.
"The argument was, you were licensing candy to your competitor, because Java was such a strategic advantage," Schmidt said.
Microsoft, which during software-programmer forums was being told to get on the Java bandwagon, entered the license with mixed feelings, said John Ludwig, a key Windows executive.
"One of the things they were telling us was, You just don't get Java, do you?' " Ludwig recalled in a Seattle Times interview earlier this year. "You get beat upside the head with that enough times and you finally realize, you know they must have a point here."
Still, Microsoft felt limited by Sun's license.
"Sun went out of their way to define Java in such a way that it didn't allow us any room for success," he said.
By the fall of 1997, the two companies clashed over contract language. Sun filed suit for breach of contract in federal district court in San Jose. Judge Ronald Whyte heard arguments in September and is expected to rule soon.
THE SUNDAY OKLAHOMAN
Copyright 1998 The Sunday Oklahoman
November 1, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: State Colleges Get Wired Online Courses, High-Speed Networks in Schools' Plans
BYLINE: Jon Denton, Staff Writer
Getting wired means different things at different schools in Oklahoma.
In Shawnee, St. Gregory's College is setting up a virtual academic department to be shared with two other institutions,
Bacone College and Bartlesville Wesleyan College.
In Bethany, excellence in computer technology has placed Southern Nazarene University among 11 schools - Harvard business school and Princeton University among them - named to Intel's Wired Campus Net Page. ...
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 01, 1998, Sunday
NAME: A. SCOTT BERG
HEADLINE: A. Scott Berg, American Biographer
Here is a man who has spent a lifetime contemplating other people's lives. A. Scott Berg's first book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, began as a high school boy's report on F. Scott Fitzgerald. The young man's interest in Fitzgerald's work and life was so intense that he applied to Fitzgerald's alma mater, Princeton University.
Within days of his arrival at Princeton, Berg discovered the Scribner archives at Firestone Library, which contained most of the papers of Fitzgerald's editor and indicated how much of the writer's success actually was owed that little-known man. "I immediately thought there was a book in that story," he recounts.
Berg's adviser at Princeton, the Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, agreed with Berg that much of Fitzgerald's story was imbedded in Perkins's papers. He suggested that Berg write his senior thesis on Perkins. Berg worked on the thesis for 4 years, was awarded an A-plus, and was told by Princeton's English Department how he might expand his work into a manuscript. For the next seven years, he took their advice. The manuscript was bought by a publisher, and, in 1978, the biography won Berg a National Book Award. ...
A decade after that, largely because of the Lindbergh family's admiration of the Perkins book, Berg secured unrestricted access to the Lindbergh papers at Yale. The result is Berg's comprehensive biography of the famous flyer, which just appeared in bookstores last month.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
November 01, 1998, Sunday
HEADLINE: In NYC? Welcome to the Club
In hotel-room-crunched Manhattan, the ultimate travel insiders seek out private clubs, such as Princeton University's, that operate full-service hotels complete with restaurants, room service and squash facilities at incredibly cheap rates. At the Princeton Club, for example, rooms start at $125 a night (although annual dues and initiation fees can run well over $1,000 a year). But a new crop of New York boutique hotels is aiming itself at the would-be club member who wants the illusion of exclusivity, with no dues -- albeit at much higher tariffs.
-- Carolyn Spencer Brown
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
November 1, 1998
HEADLINE: HALLS OF IVY;
AS STUDENTS RESIST DOWDY DORMS, COLLEGES STRUGGLE TO SPRUCE UP
BYLINE: By Linda Sandler, Wall Street Journal.
DATELINE: NEW HAVEN, Conn.
The country's most elite private colleges are using their jazzed-up campuses to market themselves to desirable faculty and students.
After years of neglect, Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University and other leading schools are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in rebuilding the dormitories and academic halls that define them. The activity reflects good marketing practices: All are competing for a generation of top students with little patience for the dingy bedrooms and airless lecture halls that satisfied their parents. ...
Others, too, are renovating: Princeton University in New Jersey will spend about $350 million over 10 years. ...
Business Times
Copyright 1998 Times Business Publications (Singapore)
October 31, 1998, Weekend Edition
HEADLINE: Shaping stories as he speaks architecture
BYLINE: Jaime Ee
Renowned architect Michael Graves' work spans the whimsical to the post-modernist. The man himself also refuses to be pigeon-holed, explaining to JAIME EE his holistic view of his chosen art form
CHANCES are that, if you are not an architect or the owner of an Alessi kettle with a bird-shaped spout, you would never have heard of Michael Graves.
Here's the background: he's hailed as one of the most prominent architects in the world, noted alternately as the founder of post-modernist architecture and the guy who also designed a kettle in the guise of Mickey Mouse.
For a soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of architecture at Princeton University, the award-winning Michael Graves hardly looks the sort to twist a kettle handle into the shape of ears. But his studious look and immaculate suit belie an architect who blends whimsy, humour and classicism into a style that is distinctively his, yet blending the identity of the client into a project at the same time.
What other architect, when hired by the Disney group to build its headquarters in Burbank, California, would aim straight for the cartoon element and construct a building complete with seven 19 foot-high dwarves with their arms raised as if they were physically supporting the roof of the building? ...
Indeed, his approach when building a house is that "you're telling stories about people, the place, the context, the landscapes, the architecture itself. You're talking about people in terms of what they collect or don't collect, what their children are like and so on. Everybody lives differently but the differences are subtle -you're talking about people who have one kind of life versus another."
It's the same philosophy he applies to his own home, an Italian villa lookalike that was built in the 1920s by Italian masons who had come to Princeton to work on the campus buildings. Originally a warehouse, Mr Graves spent 20 years renovating it, and the house is a testament to his life -Italian because of his love affair with Italy having spent some years there as a student, and surprisingly not post-modernist on the inside but a paean to all things classical and antique, ranging from his favourite Bierdemeyer furniture to his collection of antiques acquired over the years.
"Princeton, New Jersey, is certainly not an Italian town, so I have this odd building and working with the idea of an Italian building is one of the things I love about it. A lot of pieces are in the house that are generally important to me. They have to do with artifacts of architecture; momentoes from places I go to, but they all deal with architecture and architects looking at architecture -the word, the meaning, the language, the continuity -and that's the story the house tells." ...
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1998 The Dallas Morning News
October 31, 1998
HEADLINE: Praying outside the box: New books map out alternative spiritual paths if pew-sitting isnt your style
SOURCE: Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Diane Watson
When she was just 27, author Doris Grumbach experienced an extraordinary thing. She felt the presence of God.
What happened was this, writes Ms. Grumbach, now 80. I was filled with a unique feeling of peace, an impression so intense that it seemed to expand into ineffable joy, a huge delight. It went on, second after second, so pervasive that it seemed to fill my entire body. I relaxed into it, luxuriated in it. Then, with no warning, and surely without preparation or expectation, I knew what it was: for the seconds it lasted I felt, with a certainty I cannot account for, a sense of the presence of God.
In her recently published book, The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany, Ms. Grumbach describes her efforts, more than 50 years later, to feel Gods presence again. Judging the church too distracting, she forges her own spiritual path.
The current crop of books on prayer suggests Ms. Grumbach is not alone. While inspirational tomes continue to gobble up space in both religious and secular bookstores, most of these volumes target specific audiences. There are books for men and women, children and grandparents, African-Americans, New-Agers, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims.
But now a growing number of authors, like Ms. Grumbach, are telling their own stories and, in the process, reaching believers who are outside the church. ...
Brand-name religion is on the wane, so it follows that the prayer life of Americans is more eclectic and more personalized than ever, said Mr. Lattin, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. People are more interested in spirituality and prayer than ever. Although its not always clear what they mean by spiritual or to whom they are praying. ...
Diane Winston is a fellow at the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University.
The Rocky Mountain News
Copyright 1998 Denver Publishing Company (Denver, Colo.)
October 31, 1998, Saturday
HEADLINE: SEEKING HIDDEN TREASURES;
IF NBA, UNION SETTLE LOCKOUT, NUGGETS HOPE TO STRIKE GOLD BY EXPLORING FREE-AGENT MARKET
BYLINE: Dave Krieger; News Staff Writer
If the NBA and its players ever decide how to divide their $2 billion - and the two sides actually negotiated this week, which represented progress - that's when things will get crazy. Building a basketball team in microwave time might be challenging anywhere, but it will be especially challenging for the Denver Nuggets, who are again starting over. The club's new front office and coaching staff will have three or four weeks in which to acquire players and mold them into a team. ...
New Nuggets head coach Mike D'Antoni visited the Air Force Academy earlier this month to make sure he still has a location for his postponed camp. Air Force officials told him they'll work with him on last-minute scheduling requirements, which gives him a leg up on Philadelphia 76ers coach Larry Brown. Brown has the Sixers' camp scheduled at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. He's now scouting alternatives, including the Ivy League's Princeton University. ...
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1998 The Hartford Courant Company
October 31, 1998 Saturday
HEADLINE: IN THE SPIRIT OF GIVING;
CHARITABLE GROUPS ARE DONATING MONEY TO STUDY RELIGION'S IMPACT IN SOCIETY
BYLINE: GERALD RENNER; Courant Religion Writer
Private foundations have found religion, pouring largesse in many directions but particularly on college campuses.
The money spouts from such heavyweights as Pew, Lilly, Ford, Luce, Templeton, Rockefeller, W.K. Kellogg, and Robert Wood Johnson.
Scholars, particularly, are finding it easier than ever to get money to explore the impact of religion in society. Just last week, Yale University announced the formation of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion with a $2.2 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia.
It joins a growing academic parade that includes Trinity College's Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life; Princeton University's Center for the Study of American Religion; Harvard University's Pluralism Project; the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture; and Purdue University's Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. ...
The Independent
Copyright 1998 Newspaper Publishing PLC (London)
October 31, 1998, Saturday
HEADLINE: The Jonathan Davis Column: Emerge from the global gloom; As Professor Malkiel points out: 'The emerging markets road to riches is not for the faint hearted'
BYLINE: Jonathan Davis
THE SECRET of successful investment, as has often been observed, lies in avoiding doing what everyone else is doing: by definition if you do the same as everyone else, you will end up with a mediocre result.
This is sound advice in theory, but awfully difficult to follow in practice. As Keynes perceptively observed more than 50 years ago, many people would prefer to fail conventionally rather than succeed by doing something out of the ordinary.
Granted the importance of having a contrarian streak, is the place to be investing now in emerging markets? A quick scan through the statistics tells a painful story of decline over the past year. A glance at the share price history of Templeton Emerging Markets, oldest and largest of the specialist investment trusts in this area, shows what a volatile ride this particular sector has been over the last 12 years.
Despite the flight to quality by investors all over the world in recent months, one man who thinks that emerging markets are the place to go hunting for bargains these days is Professor Burton Malkiel of Princeton University in the United States. As anyone who has read his classic book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, will know, Professor Malkiel has done as much as anyone in the last 20 years to demystify stock market investment.
He is a distinguished academic who - unlike many of that breed - has not been afraid to put his money where his mouth is. Although a firm believer in efficient markets, and hence one of the earliest advocates of the merits of index funds, he was also one of the first to predict that the Eighties would be the start of a major boom period.
Now, like many other commentators, Prof Malkiel is wary of current valuation levels on Wall Street and in other major equity markets. But, as I discovered when I caught up with him the other day, he is positively gushing about the potential for emerging markets.
Emerging market funds now offer "the best bargains anywhere in the world", he says confidently. "In five to 10 years time, people will look back and say 'boy, when those bargains were there, why didn't we do something about it?'." ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 31, 1998, Saturday
HEADLINE: Executive in H.M.O. Deal Is Apparent Suicide
BYLINE: By BARBARA STEWART
Two days after New Jersey officials moved to take control of the state's fourth-largest health maintenance organization, the president of the company that had bought its medical centers was found dead at his home, apparently a suicide, the authorities said.
Dr. Paul W. Frankel, 50, was president of Pinnacle Health Enterprises in New Brunswick, N.J., which stands to lose tens of millions of dollars on the 23 medical centers it recently bought from the financially troubled H.I.P. Health Plan of New Jersey. ...
Dr. Frankel, a native of Brooklyn, lived with his wife and two children at their main home in Connecticut. After graduating from Harvard and Dartmouth Medical School, he earned a Ph.D in psychology from Princeton University.
The Denver Post
Copyright 1998 The Denver Post Corporation
October 30, 1998 Friday
HEADLINE: OBITUARIES
William Farragut Meredith of Denver, an entrepreneur, died Oct. 23 in Denver. He was 77.
Memorial services will be at 2 p.m. today at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 2201 Dexter St. There was cremation.
He was born March 18, 1921, in Princeton, N.J. He graduated from Princeton University in 1943. ...
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1998 The Hartford Courant Company
October 30, 1998 Friday
HEADLINE: WESLEYAN'S IVY BUSTERS
Some Wesleyan University students resent their school's campaign to market itself as an Ivy wannabe.
School administrators are using the slogan "An Independent Ivy" on admissions literature as a way of attracting the brightest college applicants to the Middletown campus -- not that the students who now attend are so bad. But student sticklers for accuracy took offense and recently set up a table outside the admissions office to inform those interested in applying for enrollment that the slogan is a misrepresentation born out of insecurity, not unlike fudging a resume or a high school transcript.
The protesting students correctly point out that there are only eight Ivy League schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. The colleges are among the oldest in the United States and require an average 1,400 score on the Scholastic Assessment Tests for admission. Their biggest problem is turning away qualified applicants, not attracting them.
Wesleyan, like Trinity College in Hartford, is among the great schools informally known as the Little Ivies. They, too, turn down far more applicants than they receive. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 30, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: THE 1998 CAMPAIGN: ATTORNEY GENERAL
2 Little-Known Rivals in Fierce Fight for Attorney General
BYLINE: By DAVID FIRESTONE; This article is based on reporting by Raymond Hernandez, Terry Pristin and David Firestone and was written by Mr. Firestone.
It is just below the Senate race in its intensity, bursting with bitter invective and sharply contrasting political views, but the campaign to become New York State Attorney General is being fought by two men almost unknown to the public.
One of them, Dennis C. Vacco, a Republican, has been Attorney General for the last four years, but a poll released this week by The New York Times showed that 73 percent of likely voters questioned had no opinion of him or his work. That is only slightly less than the 79 percent of voters with no opinion of his Democratic challenger, Eliot L. Spitzer, who has never held elective office, though the poll showed that Mr. Vacco was comfortably ahead of his rival.
Given the public's indifference to the race, and its general lack of knowledge of the duties of the office, the two candidates have spent more time attacking each other than outlining a broad vision of the next four years. ...
Mr. Spitzer grew up in Riverdale in the Bronx, the son of a wealthy New York City real-estate developer, Bernard Spitzer, who has lent millions to his son's campaign for office. The younger Mr. Spitzer attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the law review, and later became head of the labor racketeering unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's office. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 30, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: ADULT BRAIN CELLS SAID TO REPRODUCE
BYLINE: By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE
Through a rare glimpse inside the human brain, a team of American and Swedish scientists reported yesterday that they had discovered the generation of brain cells in adult humans for the first time, opening an important area of investigation into possible new treatments for such debilitating neurological disorders as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and stroke.
The finding is one of a series of recent discoveries that have overturned years of conventional wisdom about the human brain: that, after birth, once brain cells died off, they could never be replaced. In one such finding last spring, scientists reported substantial new cell growth in the brains of developing children under age 6.
Now, with the discovery in adults that cells are continually dividing and producing mature new cells, the potential arises that this regeneration may be used to mend a brain damaged by disease, or treat a disease caused by a damaged brain.
"The door has been opened," said Dr. Fred Gage, the team leader, at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, where the research was conducted in conjunction with Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden. It will be published in November in the journal Nature Medicine.
Dr. Gage cautioned that much more research is needed to learn whether cell creation can be put to work. But, he said, "the new research should prove interesting."
The new growth was discovered in the hippocampus, a center of learning and memory in the brain. Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York, called the discovery an "exciting development -- the isolation of a specific part of the human brain where you actually caught a glimpse of new cells being produced." Dr. McEwen and Dr. Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University published findings last March on the discovery of neurogenisis, as brain cell growth is called, in adult marmoset monkeys. Dr. Gage and others had previously recorded it in rodents. ...
The Record
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp. (Bergen County, NJ)
October 30, 1998; FRIDAY
HEADLINE: 3 N.J. STUDIES AMONG THE 80 SET FOR MISSION
BYLINE: The Associated Press
It's not just about John Glenn. While the space shuttle Discovery is in orbit, astronauts will be conducting 80 experiments in a variety of areas, three of which come from New Jersey researchers.
Pharmaceutical companies Bristol-Myers Squibb and Hoffman-La Roche and Princeton University physicist Paul Chaikin have designed projects for the astronauts to carry out. ...
Chaikin's experiment will test theories of atomic behavior. Vats of liquid containing plastic spheres, each about one-tenth of the thickness of a human hair, have been taken into space. By studying how the particles interact, Chaikin hopes to learn more about how atoms organize themselves as they form orderly solid structures.
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 1998 San Antonio Express-News
October 30, 1998, Friday
HEADLINE: Conference on fraud to provide valuable information for seniors
BYLINE: Paul Premack
This coming Thursday is the "Conference on Fraud Against Older Texans" sponsored by the Texas attorney general, the Alamo Area Council of Governments and a host of other agencies. It will be held at the St. Paul Community Center, 1201 Donaldson. If you'd like to go, please call Elena at AACOG, 362- 5239, to reserve a spot.
At the conference, various experts will discuss telemarketing fraud, economic crimes against seniors, scams and insurance fraud. I'll be closing the day with a talk on avoiding two illegal schemes for emptying your bank account: Medicaid planning fraud and living trust planning fraud.
Many people assume that the secluded elderly are the only targets of these swindles. A study by Princeton University contradicts many of these assumptions. The study found that older fraud victims are likely still to be in the workforce and to be active in community affairs. More than one- third of older fraud victims do volunteer work on a regular basis. Princeton's message: do not assume you are safe from fraud just because you are active and engaged. ...
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
October 29, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: The News In Brief
BYLINE: Compiled by Robert Kilborn and Cynthia Hanson
Etceteras
"Within three days, 300 people had contacted me. It was then that we realized we had touched a nerve." - Princeton University Prof. Sean Wilentz, on why he and other historians signed a petition opposing impeachment. ...
Dallas Observer
Copyright 1998 New Times Inc.
October 29, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: Bush's free ride
With a little help from his Democratic pals, George W. Bush has become the GOP front-runner for president. But it's a cold world beyond Texas' borders, and it may take more than charm and luck to carry a good ol' boy to the White House.
BYLINE: Stuart Eskenazi
He's dressed in gym shorts and a raggedy white "Texas Rangers" T-shirt, and he has propped his feet up in front of the TV in a cheap Brownsville hotel room. On the screen, the president of the United States is deconstructing the verb "to be."
"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' means," President Clinton tells the invisible grand jury, in a soft, measured voice. "If 'is' means 'is, and never has been,' that's one thing. If it means, 'there is none,' that was a completely true statement."
In his hotel room, Gov. George W. Bush stares at the image of the gray-haired, pink-faced president, whose testimony is being scrutinized on CNN's Inside Politics. He is appalled. For a moment, he stops plucking cheese puffs from a bowl of salty snack mix. Then he responds with a noise that doubles for a laugh. ...
George W. Bush has envisioned himself in the Oval Office, and a 21-year-old intern is nowhere in the picture. Instead, he sees himself presiding over a happy scene in which warring Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders gather together for sodas. The repartee is playful--Bush has loosened them up with his famous one-liners--yet the banter belies serious intentions. He wants them to act nice, be civil. Just like he and the Legislature did in Texas. ...
At Andover, Bush says, he did fine in history and math but poorly in English. There has long been talk that he got into Yale not because of his smarts, but because of his family name. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1962. Bush enrolled in Yale in 1964. ...
Bush admits to having two brushes with the law at Yale. One involved pilfering a Christmas wreath from a store display so he could hang it on the door of his frat house. Police booked him on a misdemeanor charge but later dropped it. The other involved tearing down the goal posts at Princeton University's football field after Yale defeated their Ivy League rival in 1967. He was not arrested. ...
The Detroit News
Copyright 1998 The Detroit News, Inc.
October 29, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: Historians seek an end of drive to impeach: MSU, U-M scholars join criticism of effort they say is unprecedented
BYLINE: By Deb Price / Detroit News Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The impeachment effort against President Clinton threatens to "leave the presidency permanently disfigured and diminished," 400 historians warned Wednesday.
"The theory of impeachment underlying these efforts is unprecedented in our history," reads their statement, which urges an end to the impeachment drive.
Entitled "Historians in Defense of the Constitution," its signatories include 10 scholars from Michigan universities.
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz called the statement "an unprecedented outpouring of professional historians." At a press conference, Wilentz rebuffed suggestions that its signatories are left-leaning, partisan Democrats.
"This is not a political effort at all," he insisted, saying that the statement reflects "historians speaking as historians." He pointed out "intense Clinton critics" among signatories, including journalist Garry Wills of Northwestern University and FDR biographer and well-known TV commentator Doris Kearns Goodwin. ...
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
October 29, 1998
HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths
SCHNEIDER, EDWIN FLYNN
SCHNEIDER-Edwin Flynn. 77, of Lost Tree Village, North Palm Beach, FL. On October 26, 1998. Beloved husband of the late Regina Caldwell. Loving & wise father of Regina Schneider de Ojea of Madrid, Spain; Edwin C. Schneider of Armonk, NY; Kathleen Schneider Pratt of Chestnut Hill, PA; and Michael Gerard Schneider of Lower Gwynedd, PA. Proud grandfather of Jeannita, Andres, Bettina Tara, Gable, Galen, Chuck, Tory, Caroline, Alexander and Graham. Graduated Princeton University Class of 1944 in Electrical Engineering. President and CEO of Ettco Wire and Cable Corp., founded 1907, a leading manufacturer of wire and cable in Brooklyn, New York. ...
Newsday
Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. (New York, NY)
October 29, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: HISTORIANS SPEAK / SCHOLARS DENOUNCE IMPEACHMENT ATTEMPT
BYLINE: By Gaylord Shaw. WASHINGTON BUREAU
DATELINE: Washington
Washington - Led by several of the country's best-known historians, more than 400 scholars and professors have joined in signing a statement denouncing the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton, saying it would mangle the constitutional system of checks and balances by leaving the presidency "permanently disfigured and diminished."
Future presidents would be crippled and "at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any Congress," said the statement announced here by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. of City University of New York, Sean Wilentz of Princeton University and C. Vann Woodward of Yale University.
"Although we do not condone President Clinton's private behavior or his subsequent attempts to deceive, the current charges against him depart from what the Constitution's framers saw as grounds for impeachment," the statement said. Clinton's lying about his sexual relations with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky doesn't rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" cited in the Constitution as needed for impeachment, the historians said. ...
The signers included Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, of Yale; Civil War historian James McPherson of Princeton; Henry Louis Gates of Harvard; civil rights leader Julian Bond of the University of Virginia; Lincoln biographer David Donald of Harvard; journalist and author Garry Wills of Northwestern; John Morton Blum of Yale; Taylor Branch of Goucher College, historian of the civil rights movement; historian Stephen Ambrose; Jimmy Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley; Sheldon Hackney of the University of Pennsylvania; and Jack N. Rakove of Stanford, winner of a 1997 Pulitzer for history.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
October 29, 1998, Thursday
HEADLINE: 400 Historians Denounce Impeachment; Case Against Clinton Departs From Framers' Intent for Presidency, Letter Argues
BYLINE: John F. Harris, Washington Post Staff Writer
Some 400 of the nation's leading historians and presidential scholars came to President Clinton's defense yesterday with an open letter complaining that if the impeachment proceedings against him are successful it would leave the presidency "permanently disfigured" and hold "the most serious implications for our constitutional order."
Two of the nation's most celebrated historians -- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward -- were on hand to represent an informal coalition calling itself "Historians in Defense of the Constitution." Among those who signed were Stephen Ambrose, James McGregor Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Gary Wills, all of whom have written best-selling histories and presidential biographies. ...
The petition drive was organized by Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, who said he first enlisted Schlesinger and Woodward, then rounded up other signatories by phone, fax and e-mail.
Wilentz said the group, though it included many well-known liberal activists, is not partisan, and includes many people with no special affection for Clinton. Wills, on the faculty of Northwestern University, has called on Clinton to resign, while biographer Goodwin has written critically about Clinton's behavior in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair. ...
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Copyright 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
October 28, 1998
HEADLINE: FILES SHOW WHITE HOUSE PRESSURED FBI TO SNOOP ON MAGNUSON IN '50S
BYLINE: MICHAEL PAULSON P-I WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
The Eisenhower administration unsuccessfully tried to get the FBI to dig up dirt on Sen. Warren Magnuson as the Republicans sought a way to defeat the Washington Democrat in 1956.
When the FBI refused to cooperate, a top Eisenhower aide asked the agency to recommend a private detective who would do the work. The bureau declined.
The Republicans' failed attempt to come up with a scandal that might tar Magnuson is among historical tidbits revealed in the FBI's extensive files on Magnuson, portions of which were provided to the Post-Intelligencer under the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Magnuson, who died in 1989 at the age of 84, has a fabled place in the history of Washington state politics. The FBI files offer nothing to dramatically alter Magnuson's place in history, but provide a variety of previously unreported details about his public life.
Scholars say the documents shed new light not only on Magnuson but also on Eisenhower's de facto chief of staff, Sherman Adams, the aide who asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate Magnuson. ...
Two scholars interviewed about the FBI reports said there has been no previous indication of Adams trying to use the FBI for political purposes. They said they considered it highly unlikely that Eisenhower was personally involved in the incident.
"The whole incident sounds very Cold War-esque, and there must have been an image that the FBI was available for Adams to do this," said Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein, author of an Eisenhower biography. "Adams was viewed as a very blunt, laconic person who could be a very aggressive partisan, but there has never been anything that would have indicated he was trying to use the FBI for political purposes."
Adams was forced to resign his White House post because he had accepted expensive gifts from an industrialist. He died 12 years ago yesterday at the age of 87. ...
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
October 28, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: McDonogh duo applies to Princeton; All-Mets Daly, Rosenbaum may join Davis with Tigers
BYLINE: Lem Satterfield, SUN STAFF
McDonogh All-Metro senior lacrosse players Owen Daly and Joe Rosenbaum said they have applied for early decision to attend Princeton, where they plan to play for the three-time defending NCAA champions.
The duo joins Gilman's Damien Davis, an All-Metro defenseman, who announced last week that he had applied to Princeton.
Daly, a member of U.S. under-19 lacrosse team, is considered by many Division I lacrosse coaches to be the nation's No. 1 midfield recruit. Rosenbaum, who last season was the only undergraduate from the MIAA A Conference to earn All-America honors, ranks with Davis as a top defensive recruit.
"I'm looking forward to the possibility of playing at Princeton," Daly said. "I'd love to play with Damien and Joe for Coach [Bill] Tierney." ...
The Boston Herald
Copyright 1998 Boston Herald Inc.
October 28, 1998 Wednesday
HEADLINE: Op Ed; Prof. Death takes ideas to Princeton
BYLINE: By Don Feder
Unintended ironies abounded last week. Bill Clinton (can you believe it?) proclaimed it "National Character Counts Week." Ginger Spice was designated a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador. Can she spell U.N.?
If that weren't enough, there's the ongoing controversy over Peter Singer's appointment to the Ira W. DeCamp Chair of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values.
Appointing the Australian philosopher to a center for human values is like giving Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic a brotherhood award.
The author of "Animal Liberation" and "Practical Ethics" (Joseph Mengele would have found them efficacious), Singer's perspective is uniformly anti-human - pigs and monkeys have rights, handicapped babies do not.
His views on eliminating the disabled have led to protests wherever he's spoken in Europe. ...
Justin Harmon, Princeton's director of communications, defends Singer as "a first-rate scholar who will help the scholarly debate on these issues." Besides, "It's not the university's position to make people comfortable," the Princeton flack sniffs.
Really? Then why do most Ivy League schools have speech codes?
Is Harmon suggesting that Princeton will soon be appointing a raft of professors who will challenge us from the right - academics who question the dogma that homosexuality is innate, right-to-lifers, immigration skeptics and the like?
Perish the thought. In academia, intellectual challenge is only allowed from the left. ...
I wouldn't be at all surprised if he ended up as the president of Princeton. At which point, handicapped students would be well advised to sleep with their lights on. ...
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Copyright 1998 The Cincinnati Enquirer
October 28, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: Governor's race: Two men, two styles, one ambition
TAFT puts his record over his charisma
BYLINE: Stories by SANDY THEIS
SOURCE: Enquirer Columbus Bureau
For most politicians, a bank of microphones is like a homing device.
If primary election night is any indication, Bob Taft is unlike most politicians.
Voters had just clobbered a proposed state sales tax hike for schools, and dozens of microphones sat stacked on a file cabinet in Mr. Taft's office, each hoping to collect the GOP candidate for governor's thoughts on the future of funding for the state's troubled public schools.
Mr. Taft approached the microphones, then backed away - almost instinctively.
Reporters urged him forward, and he sheepishly told those assembled, "I'll have something to say on that tomorrow."
Robert A. Taft II, holder of Ohio's most prominent GOP surname, often seems reticent, even shy, in the political limelight. ...
After leaving the Peace Corps, Mr. Taft headed to Princeton University for graduate school. His studies included a trip to Guatemala City - a trip that would change his life.
At the airport, he had a brief conversation with a tall blonde from Arkansas who was helping her elderly aunt with public health work. The young woman's name was Hope.
One week later, when Mr. Taft and his classmates were planning a party, he went looking for the woman in the airport.
With help from Catholic Relief Services, for whom Mrs. Taft's aunt was working, he found her.
They began dating soon after.
"My Aunt Frances asked me if Bob was from the Tafts of Ohio and I said, 'I don't know. Who are the Tafts of Ohio?' A year later, I was a Taft of Ohio." ...
Copyright 1998 BUSINESS LINE
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
October 28, 1998
HEADLINE: Monetary policy - 1992-97- The intellectual framework
Today's environment requires that a central bank should be transparent in its approach and explain the rationale for its actions. This means it should have a clear intellectual framework that is well understood outside as well, says N. A. MUJUMDAR.
TODAY, central banks have become more powerful than ever. Monetary policy has become the central tool of macroeconomic stabilisation and in many countries its conduct is in the hands of independent central banks. In the 1998 Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures, Prof. Alan Blinder of Princeton University, argued that central banking can only be conducted effectively within a proper intellectual framework. This must be based on dynamic optimisation where each year a plan is selected for the future that will produce the best available time-path for output and inflation. This does not mean that the policy becomes inflexible because the whole trick is to remake the plan each year. But unless we make today's policy apart of a longer-term strategy, we shall tend to continue for long with a policy that is either too tight or too loose (Central Banking in Theory and Practice, Alan S. Blinder, 1998).
Intellectual clarity, of course, improves practical action. What is more, today's environment requires that a central bank should be transparent in its approach and explain the rationale for its actions. This means it should have a clear intellectual framework that is well understood outside as well. It is this need which perhaps has made the modern central banker loquacious and publicity-savvy. The conventional image of the central banker as being demure and publicity-shy is no longer valid in the modern times.
It is against this broader canvas that Dr. C. Rangarajan's collection of 28 scholarly essays on Money and Finance brought out recently needs to be evaluated (Indian Economy: Essays on Money and Finance, 1998). Like Alan Blinder, Dr. Rangarajan combines academic eminence with the practical experience of central banking - first, as Deputy Governor for almost a decade and subsequently as the RBI Governor for five years, 1992-97. It was during the latter period that the Indian economy witnessed a structural transformation, moving away from a planned towards a market-driven economy. ...
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright 1998 The Hartford Courant Company
October 28, 1998 Wednesday
HEADLINE: LANGDON G. RANKIN; ESSEX RESIDENT;
Langdon G. Rankin of River Road, Essex, died Monday. He was 90.
He was born in Newark, N.J., and graduated from Princeton University in 1930. He was assistant headmaster at Eaglebrook School, Deerfield, Mass., and at Fay School, Southboro, Mass. He was headmaster and later headmaster emeritus of East Woods School, Oyster Bay, N.Y. ...
Investor's Business Daily
Copyright 1998 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
October 28, 1998
HEADLINE: IS THE U.S. MILITARY OUT OF STEP?
BYLINE: By Brian Mitchell, Investor's Daily
Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said it all, without meaning to.
Asked last year about the Air Force's prosecution of Lt. Kelly Flinn for crimes related to an adulterous relationship, Lott told the Air Force to ''get real.'' The Pentagon was ''not in touch with reality,'' he said, and Flinn should get an honorable discharge ''at the minimum.''
Such words from the Senate majority leader spoke volumes about the suspicion and hostility that exists between the uniformed services and Congress. ...
The draft is still the favored solution of Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist at Northwestern University. Moskos, however, sees conscription as a way to discipline society and leaven the liberalism of governing elites.
Moskos noted that two-thirds of his class at Princeton University in the '50s served in the military. One-third was drafted; the other third entered through the Reserve Officers Training Corps. And more of his Princeton classmates served than his public high school classmates.
In lieu of a draft, which Moskos admits is unlikely, he says federal college aid should be tied to national military or civilian service, as proposed by the ill-fated Nunn-McCurdy Bill. Educational aid currently entails no service in return. ...
The New York Post
Copyright 1998 N.Y.P. Holdings, Inc.
October 28, 1998, Wednesday
HEADLINE: 'THE MARTIANS HAVE LANDED!' - IN RADIO SHOW 60 YEARS AGO, AMERICA LOST ITS INNOCENCE
BYLINE: ERIC FETTMANN
LOLLY Dey was 16 years old the night the Martians landed in her back yard. What's more, millions of people across the nation heard it happen - live.
She was playing the organ at a Sunday night church service near her home in Grover's Mill, a small community just outside Princeton, N.J., when, she recalled a few years ago, a man burst in the back of the church and yelled, "The Martians have landed in Grover's Mill!'
It was Oct. 30, 1938 - 60 years ago this Friday - and a 23-year-old theatrical Wunderkind named Orson Welles was in the process of scaring the daylights out of the entire nation. ...
It sounded so real that millions were convinced it was. Indeed, a Princeton University study later concluded that of the 6 million people who heard at least part of the broadcast, 1.7 million thought it was a real news event - and 1.2 million of those took some sort of action. ...
NOTE: The Office of Communications has been unable to verifty the source of this study. If any faculty or staff know who did the study, please e-mail caffrey@princeton.edu.