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December 15 - 31, 1998 | Feedback
The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society
December 31, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: The decade of 'Seinfeld' and cyber-everything
BYLINE: Sara Terry, Special correspondent of The Christian Science MonitorIt is a decade that has given rise to a host of trends and changes: grunge rock and Generation X; crystals and New Age spirituality; celebrity worship and tell-all talk shows; the information superhighway and cyber-everything.
With only a year left on the clock, however, what the 1990s have so far failed to yield is one simple word or catchphrase that sums up the way it was.
"There are decades and there are decades," says Sean Wilentz, director of American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey.
"The '60s were a decade," he adds, referring to a decade readily identified as a period of social revolution. And he notes that the 1970s and 1980s were also easily labeled as the "me" decade and the "greed" decade, respectively. "But I'm not sure the '90s measure up," he says. …
THE SUN NEWS
Copyright 1998 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
December 31, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Horry County, S.C., Residents Rank Highly as Charitable Givers
BYLINE: By David WrenMYRTLE BEACH, S.C.--The Christmas holiday combined with the end of the tax year is one of the busiest times for charitable giving, and a study shows Horry County residents are more likely than the average American to donate their time and money to good causes.
Residents of Georgetown County and Brunswick County, N.C., however, are more Scroogelike when it comes to support for civic groups and charities, according to the study by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.
The study ranks the "social capital" of every county in the nation according to a list of variables that measure income, employment, education and other factors. …
Nationally, the most charitable communities are found in northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
"One theory for why these areas are high in social capital is that they were settled by Germans and Swedes coming from a Social democratic tradition in Europe," Julian Wolpert, a professor at Princeton University, told American Demographics magazine recently for a story that publication published on the Urban Institute study. "The areas are also homogeneous with few minorities, and people may be more generous when they're giving to people like themselves."…
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
December 31, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Blessing times eight
BYLINE: Rob SchenckAnother salvo has been launched in the culture wars. Make that eight salvos. The Chukwu octuplets (I'm not sure anyone has ever used the word octuplet seriously) were being given an 85 percent chance of survival. The smallest of them succumbed, but not until after she and her seven brothers and sisters made an incomparable contribution to the debate over the value of human life. …
From the moment of their birth, medical professionals, social engineers and news anchors questioned what good could come from giving birth to so many human beings. One Ob-Gyn said on national television that "giving birth to so many fetuses" places them and their mother at grave risk. Did I hear that right? "Giving birth to fetuses?" I thought for sure that the dehumanizing term, fetus, was reserved for babies in the womb, in other words, babies who we are not sure we want yet. …
In any case, I was stunned to hear a medical professional extend the status of fetus outside the womb. But, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, Professor Peter Singer, lately of Princeton University, has published his notion that mothers ought to be given a 30-day post-natal cancellation period on all their new-born "fetuses." That's right. He has advanced the novel idea that a mom (and maybe a dad) should be allowed a "grace" period to decide whether they really want to magically change their "fetuses" into "babies" by keeping them. …
ABC NEWS
SHOW: ABC 20/20
DECEMBER 30, 1998HEADLINE: TO THE PEAK
BYLINE: JAY SCHADLER, DIANE SAWYER, SAM DONALDSONHIGHLIGHT: VALIANT JOURNEY BY A SPECIAL GROUP OF WOMEN
DIANE SAWYER: Our next story is about a group of amazing women, women we think who will become your friends. They have faced personal crises that would be enough of a challenge for anyone. And now, they're looking to conquer a mountain and draw from it hope, courage and the strength for survival.
As we've said, they've already surmounted incredible odds. Now, Jay Schadler will take you on a journey with them that will, in many ways, take your breath away.
JAY SCHADLER, ABC News: (voice-over) Mount McKinley -- a bone-chilling citadel of ice and stone. At 20,300 feet, it is the highest summit in North America and arguably the most extreme peak on the planet. Located only 260 miles from the Arctic Circle, its climate makes Mount Everest seem almost temperate.
Even in April, temperatures here can fall to 70 degrees below zero. And yet, they come. Each spring, climbers from across the globe travel here to test themselves against the mountain known to natives as "Denali, the high one." …
JAY SCHADLER: (voice-over) ...few believed their efforts would go much beyond this cheerful salute, and fewer still could know that these women had already scaled a mountain more deadly than McKinley.
SANDY BADILLO (ph): I sat in front of my doctor's desk, and he actually said, "You are the healthiest patient I have. We'll just get this mammogram over with, and we'll be on the road. You're fine. You just caught a flu." …
SANDY BADILLO: My doctor called me at home. And he did tell me that they found cancer in the lump, and I just started crying and dropped the phone. And my daughter came in and says, "Are you all right, Mom?" And I says, "No, honey. It's more serious than we thought." …
JAY SCHADLER: (voice-over) Three years ago, they joined the Breast Cancer Fund's McKinley climb, a symbolic quest to draw attention to a disease that has become a virtual epidemic, striking one in seven American women. …
JAY SCHADLER: (voice-over) Practicing on western mountains like Shasta, Tahoe and Whitney, they have spent weeks in the white cold, learning to pitch tents, break a trail, survive. Training alongside them are seven younger women, five of them from Princeton University. Although cancer-free themselves, these younger women have joined the McKinley climb in a show of support.
CLIMBER FROM PRINCETON: These women, several of them recovering from recent operations and time spent in hospitals, are out here kicking their own butts to get up the mountain. I mean, it's absolutely incredible, and who am I to say I'm tired or I'm stopping or I'm not going when they're plowing right by me? …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 30, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths LEONARD, ARCHIE WILLARD.
LEONARD-Archie Willard. Died December 23, 1998 at his home in Beaufort, SC. A graduate of South Kent School and Princeton University (class of '39). He worked for Pan American World Airways for thirty years. He is survived by his wife of 52 years Ann Morrison Leonard, a brother, three children and five grandchildren.
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Copyright 1998 MacNeil/Lehrer Productions
December 30, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Bombing Trial; New Crackdown; Neglected News; Year of Common Sense
JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight Tim Sullivan of Court TV updates a new grand jury report on the Oklahoma City bombing. Elizabeth Farnsworth guides a discussion of China's new crackdown on dissident; media correspondent Terence Smith and our regional commentators look at the news stories that went under-reported in 1998, and essayist Roger Rosenblatt offers some end-of-the-year words about the American people. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday. …
FOCUS - NEW CRACKDOWN
JIM LEHRER: China's latest crackdown on dissent and to Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: On Sunday, a labor activist in Southern China became the fourth dissident in a week sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Jiang Zhang Wang had been trying to set up an association to protect the rights of laid-off workers, but the crime cited in his conviction was "illegally providing intelligence to overseas enemy organizations and people."
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: This -- apparently because he gave an interview to Radio Free Asia, a Washington-based, U.S. Government-funded organization, which beams political and other news and analysis to China. Authorities there regularly try to block the broadcasts. In the interview Zhang described a farmers' protest against excessive taxes in Hunan Province and another demonstration there that resulted in violence and death. …
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Minxin Pei, do you see this in that way, as a systematic campaign by these different organizations?
MINXIN PEI, Princeton University: Well, I - I'm not following how many people are being sentenced. I think so far only four people have been sentenced, although many people have been detained or harassed. I think in the short-term certainly this is a very serious and unfortunate step backward for China. I don't know how long this campaign will continue if it continues say for another six months - that would certainly be very disturbing.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But at this point you see it as a step backwards in the midst of two steps forwards?
MINXIN PEI: Well, as an optimist I'm inclined to think so, because if we look at what has been happening in China in the last six months certainly the signs of openness were very encouraging right now, much less encouraged. …
The Plain Dealer
Copyright 1998 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
December 30, 1998 WednesdayHEADLINE: POSSIBILITY OF CLINTON CENSURE RAISES QUESTION OF HIS POLITICAL VIABILITY
BYLINE: By ROBERT COHEN; NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTONHe's been branded morally reprehensible, charged with degrading his office and impeached by the Republican-led House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
In a matter of weeks, William Jefferson Clinton, confessed sinner and lame-duck president, is expected to fight off removal from office and instead be harshly censured by the Senate for his conduct in concealing an extramarital relationship with a young White House intern.
And then, with this resounding dual condemnation from Congress and a besmirched historical legacy, Clinton will be faced with governing the United States for the next two years. …
But Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University, said Clinton, a man who is "always at his best when he is at his worst," should not be written off.
Greenstein said Clinton surprised everyone by winning bigger victories with the Republicans in charge of Congress rather than Democrats, maintained high public approval following the airing of his grand jury testimony and his impeachment, and remains in office while two Republican leaders and adversaries - Reps. Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Bob Livingston of Louisiana - have fallen.
"I think it could be one more irony," said Greenstein. …
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
December 30, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: From government welfare to workfare
BYLINE: Doug BandowWelfare reform is one of the few tangible achievements of the GOP Congress. No major programs have disappeared, spending continues to race ahead and revenues are jumping even faster. But in 1995 Republicans pushed through a dramatic change in the welfare system. One of the most important changes was to require recipients to work. Many conservatives consider this provision to be Congress' finest accomplishment.
Not Princeton economist Robert Solow, however. In "Work and Welfare" - which brings together Mr. Solow's Tanner lectures at Princeton as well as a series of responses from four experts - Mr. Solow opines: " W e are already hearing foolishly premature statements about the immediate effects and longer-run consequences of this particular version of workfare, both from the Congress that should not have passed it and from the president who should not have signed it."
Mr. Solow begins by asking an unorthodox question: How does welfare fit at the intersection of self-reliance and altruism? His answer is simple: Work is the best accommodation. It is good, Mr. Solow suggests, not just for taxpayers but also for recipients, many of whom acknowledge how easy it is to grow dependent on federal largess. But he does not believe that going from welfare to work can "be accomplished in ways that are neither punitive nor degrading." The problem is that many, if not most, welfare recipients have limited job skills and difficulty in working steadily, making it unlikely that they will find only low-paying employment. …
In his view, "Simply abolishing welfare reduces everyone at the bottom of the wage distribution to deeper poverty." Instead, he proposes that welfare "top up the lowest earnings to allow a 'decent' standard of living," essentially packaging work and welfare together, which means either public-sector jobs or government incentives for private firms to hire welfare recipients. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Former Kamehameha student testifies in Lindsey trial
DATELINE: HONOLULUA former student body president at the Kamehameha Schools has testified that he was reduced to tears when Bishop Estate trustee Lokelani Lindsey confronted him in her office.
Kamani Kuala'au, now a student at Princeton University, testified Monday in the trial on a motion to remove Lindsey as a trustee.
Fellow trustees Oswald Stender and Gerard Jervis, who filed the motion, say Lindsey is unfit to continue serving as a trustee.
Kuala'au said he met with Stender about his concerns over the future of Kamehameha President Michael Chun. He said that after Stender told him Chun was about to be fired, he and another student wrote a letter in support of Chun.
He said Lindsey called him to her office and told him not to send the letter to the media or the state Supreme Court, which appointed the trustees.
Kuala'au said Lindsey told him, "I'm not going to do this, but how would you feel if I wrote to Princeton and told them you are a rabble-rouser?" He said he considered this a "scare tactic" to get him not to print the letter, and said it worked. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Scientists tests mockups of nuclear warheads
DATELINE: SANTA FEA team from Los Alamos National Laboratory has exploded two mockups of nuclear weapons components in a tunnel under the Nevada desert, U.S. Department of Energy officials say.
The explosions Dec. 11 were the fifth of a series of subcritical tests that never reach a nuclear explosion, officials said.
The test, code-named "Cimarron," is the closest scientists have come to underground testing of an actual weapons component since the 1992 end to full-blown nuclear testing. …
Details of the test are classified. Lab officials declined comment.
Critics said the test is a dangerous turn for nuclear weapons research in the United States and abroad.
"It's tests of that kind that I've been concerned about because they're directly connected with the testing of design for new types of (nuclear) weapons," said Theodore Taylor, a former weapons designer at the lab and a visiting fellow at Princeton University. …
Financial Times (London)
Copyright 1998 The Financial Times Limited
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Set to keep rollin' along: Smart moves by the Fed should allow the US economy to keep growing in 1999, but it is at some risk from a fall in share prices and consumer spending, says Alan Blinder
Like ol' man river, the giant US economy just keeps rollin' along. Year-on-year growth was nearly 4 per cent in the third quarter of this year, and seems likely to top 3 per cent again in the fourth. The average growth rate over the past eight quarters is nearly 4 per cent. Net job creation has been averaging about 260,000 per month for the past two years, and the unemployment rate has remained below 5 per cent for 17 consecutive months.
Amid all this marvellous growth news, inflation stubbornly refuses to perk up. Indeed, by most measures it has been falling. Real wages, long the laggard in the US, have been rising smartly of late. There are even hints that productivity may be growing a bit faster.
Will it continue? …
What were these pleasant surprises? On the supply side, energy prices fell (and are still falling), the rising dollar made imports cheaper, healthcare inflation subsided (until recently), and computer prices, which always fall, suddenly starting dropping at more than double their previous rate. In addition, the government has been fixing flaws in the Consumer Price Index and that has so far reduced measured inflation by almost one-half of a percentage point. …
But there was more. Throughout this period, the unsinkable American consumer was digging ever deeper into his wallet, driving the personal saving rate down until it finally dipped into negative territory in the past two months - for the first time since the 1930s. …
The author is a professor of economics at Princeton University and vice-chairman of the G7 Group. He was formerly vice-chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: A CRASH COURSE FOR COLLEGE CANDIDATES;
ANXIOUS PARENTS OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS MAY TURN TO COSTLY--AND UNREGULATED--PRIVATE COUNSELORS TO HELP THEIR TEENS PASS MUSTER WITH ADMISSIONS PANELS. DOES THE STRATEGY REALLY HELP?BYLINE: TINA NGUYEN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Even the color of your fingernails matters, Elaine Auyoung's private college counselor told her. Keep them unpolished for the Harvard interview so your hands won't detract from your face. Wear a watch and carry a purse; they make you appear mature.
Detail, details. Elaine's personal counselor doesn't miss a step.
Coached and groomed, Elaine believes she's better prepared, polished and positioned to get into the Ivy League. Perhaps she's right--Harvard recently sent her an early acceptance slip.
"You have to know how to package yourself and tailor yourself to each school," said the Irvine high school senior, who despite the nod from Harvard still is sending applications this month to Stanford, Yale, Princeton and Columbia. At the tender age of 17, Elaine is mastering the art of self-marketing. And she's not alone.
An increasing number of parents are spending thousands of dollars to guarantee their college-minded children hours of individual time with private guidance counselors--a luxury most students lack in public high schools. …
"Parents definitely need the help and students are facing intense pressures none of us had to deal with growing up," said Pat McDonough, a UCLA associate professor who also studies the industry of independent counselors.
In a 1995 survey of students, McDonough found that nearly 3% of the nation's freshmen had used a private counselor in high school. Most of those who had were attending prestigious colleges. Indeed, the vast majority of colleges already admit most applicants. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: The Universe as Telescope
BYLINE: By JOHN NOBLE WILFORDFaraway in the cosmos, where everything is separated by distances measured in hundreds and billions of light-years, sometimes a galaxy or cluster of galaxies in the foreground intersects the light from an even more distant object. The conjunction plays visual tricks, creating mirages that are becoming a practical tool of astronomy, a kind of natural telescope.
Aided by more sensitive cameras and advanced computer technologies, systematic searches of the heavens are yielding an increasing number of examples of such celestial phenomena, known as gravitational lenses. Scientists are learning to interpret these distorting and magnifying lensing events for revealing clues in the most intractable mysteries of the universe. …
At the suggestion of Dr. Bohdan Paczynski, a Princeton University astrophysicist, a team of astronomers has focused on fields of stars near the center of the Milky Way or out in the neighboring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. If one of these stars suddenly brightens and grows fainter in a characteristic way over a period of several weeks, this is presumably evidence of some intermediate dark mass acting as a lens in the line of sight, possibly a macho. Several candidates have been identified, though interpretations are controversial. …
American astronomers led by Dr. Edwin L. Turner of Princeton University, working at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, are monitoring the Einstein Cross quasar, which is lensed by an intervening galaxy. They are watching for peculiar perturbations and magnifications in the lensed light when a single star in the galaxy moves directly into the line of sight. When one is detected, the Hubble Space Telescope in Earth orbit will be focused on the strongly magnified target to examine its spectrum of light. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 29, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: On the Trail of the Monarch, With the Aid of Chemistry
BYLINE: By CAROL KAESUK YOONEvery winter, after flying south from the Eastern United States, millions of monarch butterflies festoon fir trees in the mountains of Mexico, creating one of the world's most dazzling and famous biological spectacles. But in spite of intense interest in these beloved insects, the details of their travels, like those of so many creatures that do not submit to tagging or to voyeuristic techniques like radio-transmitters, have largely remained a mystery.
Now three new studies, including one released Dec. 22 on monarchs, herald the arrival of a powerful new technique that can identify, sometimes to within a few miles, where migrating animals -- from butterflies to mastodons to humans -- have been. The new technique takes advantage of different forms, known as isotopes, of chemical elements. Biologists have begun discovering that these isotopes, present in different amounts in different regions, can leave a distinctive chemical signature written in the feather of a bird or the wing of a butterfly. …
In addition, others are tracking declining songbirds and salmon, and two paleontologists, Kathryn Hoppe at Princeton University and Dr. Paul Kock at the University of California at Santa Cruz, are reconstructing the movements of fossil mastodons and mammoths. Meanwhile, there remain many untapped isotopes and as many new questions to be asked. …
Asbury Park Press
Copyright 1998 Asbury Park Press, Inc. (Neptune, NJ.)
December 28, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
PHILIP CASE, 81, of MANCHESTER, died Tuesday at Crestwood Manor Convalescent Center, Manchester. He was a self-employed insurance agent, owning Case Insurance Agency, Somerville, for 25 years before retiring in 1968. …
He was a graduate of the Class of 1942 of Princeton University and a member of the Community Reformed Church, Whiting, Manchester. Born in Somerville, he lived there before moving to Manchester 27 years ago. …
The National Law Journal
Copyright 1998 The New York Law Publishing CompanyDecember 28, 1998 / January 4, 1999
HEADLINE: Appeals Ruling Is Hidden Hand for Microsoft
BYLINE: BY KAREN DONOVAN, NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL STAFF REPORTER
DATELINE: WASHINGTONHIGHLIGHT: A D.C. Circuit decision could dictate the outcome of the vital antitrust trial.
There was a collective sigh of relief in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on the afternoon of Dec. 16, when the parties to the Microsoft trial finally arrived at a truce over the introduction of a slew of videotaped depositions and headed to the judge's chambers with their agreement to submit the transcripts and tapes, rather than play them in court for yet another day. …
Still, the fight amounts to a Jesuitical debate over what constitutes an operating system. Two witnesses came to court to dispute Microsoft's contention that Windows is one product and that the browser cannot be separated from it. One of them was Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University professor who came up with a method for removing files that provide access to the Internet Explorer from Windows without breaking it. Under cross-examination by Microsoft's in-house lawyer David Heiner, Professor Felten called Microsoft decision to package codes into shared libraries that cannot be taken apart was "not necessary" for Web browsing to occur.
After a Dec. 14 video demonstration of Mr. Felten's method, Mr. Boies waxed confident on the courthouse steps. "There simply are no plausible technical justifications" for Microsoft's decision to weld its code together so that it cannot be broken apart. He said that it amounts to Microsoft's saying "they deserve a pass under the antitrust laws because software is different" from other products. "We've now made an evidentiary record that that defense simply does not apply as a matter of fact." But Professor Felten also responded "yes" when Mr. Heiner asked him, "Sharing code can lead to better performance, right?" …
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
DECEMBER 28, 1998HEADLINE: Health Inflation
BYLINE: Robert Siegel, Washington, DC; Noah Adams, Washington, DC
HIGHLIGHT: NPR's Julie Rovner reports that double-digit health care cos inflation is on the immediate horizon. But who cares? The economy is zipping along and employers don't want to miff employees by cutting their health benefits to save money. So highly restrictive HMOs are out; more generous plans are in.
NOAH ADAMS, HOST: This is NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Noah Adams.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel.
Just a year ago, health care spending in the United States marked its lowest increase in 40 years. But now health insurance costs are starting to shoot up. Premiums for HMOs rose an average of nine percent this year. And in 1999, increases are expected to hit double digits for most customers. …
JULIE ROVNER, NPR REPORTER: Between 1993 and 1997, spending on health care slowed nearly as precipitously as it had been rising for the three decades before. But Princeton health economist Uwe Reinhardt says one of the main reasons wasn't that costs actually fell, but rather that much of the working population moved from traditional insurance into managed health care plans.
UWE REINHARDT, HEALTH ECONOMIST, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: So when you sort of shift from these high-cost plans into lower-cost plans that actually looks as if health care costs are not rising at all, although each insurance product itself might have its premium go up. …
ROVNER: At some point, though, that war causes the price of insurance to drop so low that it no longer covers the costs. That's the current situation, Reinhardt says.
REINHARDT: Now, in another phase they are chasing not market share, but margin. And you chase margin by what Wall Street calls disciplined pricing and you and I would call bold price increases -- both increases in premiums. …
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Austin American-Statesman
December 27, 1998HEADLINE: Former Clinton aide's post will be far from the podium
BYLINE: Bruce HightMichael McCurry, who spent most of 1998 fielding barbed questions from the White House press corps about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, recently got hit with an even tougher one at home, from his son, a second-grader:
Is there, or is there not, a Santa Claus?
McCurry, 44, doesn't rattle easily, and he retreated quickly to the last refuge of an embattled press secretary: He would neither confirm nor deny.
But after courting McCurry for almost two years, Jack Martin, chairman of Public Strategies Inc., got a more direct answer: Yes, he would go to work for the public affairs firm in Washington, D.C. …
The genial McCurry will be point man for a joint venture, called Public Strategies Group, between Martin's Public Strategies and Public Strategies Washington Inc., a 12-member lobbying firm run by Joe O'Neill. …
McCurry, reared in Redwood City, Calif., said some of his high school friends are now in the high-tech business in Silicon Valley -- potential business targets. He is a graduate of Princeton University. …
The Boston Globe
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
December 27, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Of life and culture, from the playful to the satirical
BOOK REVIEW / POETRY;HAY By Paul Muldoon. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 131 pp. $22.
BYLINE: By Andrew FrisardiThe Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who teaches at Princeton University, is without question one of the most inventive poets writing in English today. His admirers justly praise his unpredictableness, verbal panache, and downright maniacal gusto. These very virtues, however, can be problematic, as his critics complain, since, while Muldoon is seemingly able to make a poem out of almost nothing, an unusual ability, to say the least, sometimes his poetry seems to be just that: sweet - or, more often, pungent - nothings.
Muldoon's wickedly witty verbal invention and high-spirited lampooning of everything, including himself, is in top form in the 30-sonnet sequence that finishes "Hay," a wild tour de force of verbal legerdemain and weird juxtaposition. In Muldoon's poetry, settings can change as rapidly as they do in dreams; here, the "focus" alternates between a fancy Paris restaurant; a death-ferry crossing the Sea of Moyle with the speaker's father on board; rural Australia, which apparently constitutes a kind of afterlife; and ancient Troy, where Aeneas is in the process of rescuing his father from the flames. …
Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 1998 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
December 27, 1998, SUNDAYHEADLINE: Surveying the spirit; Gallup polls reveal yearning for God
George H. Gallup Jr.'s name is synonymous with polls. The family business started by his father is best known for taking the pulse of Americans on a wide range of issues.
For Gallup, the polling on religion is closest to his heart.
Gallup, who was born in Evanston in 1930, majored in religion at Princeton University (with a senior thesis based on a survey he conducted on the public's belief in God). In the 1950s, he worked on a religious mission in Texas. He wanted to be an Episcopal priest.
The family business won out, but he has combined his two passions. He co-founded the Princeton Religion Research Center, which uses polling to gauge the width and breadth of faith in America. In 1988, he helped start the George H. Gallup International Institute -- named after his dad -- to find "new approaches to social problems in education, environment, health, religion and human values."
You call your work something of a ministry?
I do believe my work is a kind of ministry, because the most worthy pursuit and profound purpose of surveys is to determine to the extent it's possible how people are responding to God. Not only in terms of the response, but also what information can be useful to people in understanding where others are in their spiritual lives, too. This is a new frontier of research, the inner life. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 27, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: MAKING IT WORK; What a Good Name Is Worth
BYLINE: By WILLIAM GRIMESAS New York real estate deals go, this one was special. No one moved out. No one moved in. No construction was even involved. But $25 million changed hands.
The landlord was the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which received a $25 million gift in mid-September from Julian H. Robertson Jr., a hedge fund manager and new board member. The center expressed thanks in the most heartfelt way a nonprofit organization can: It renamed the plaza.
Now the multitudes who stream toward the Metropolitan Opera or Avery Fisher Hall (sidestepping the Revson Fountain) tread not on anonymous marble but on the Josie Robertson Plaza, forever linked with the name of Mr. Robertson's wife. …Despite their bargain prices, intangible opportunities, like scholarships and educational programs, offer a better shot at immortality than edifices, which can come and go. "Buildings are not eternal," said Ms. Goodman of Mount Sinai. "Your name appears for the duration of the structure." When multiple buildings were razed during Mount Sinai's recent expansion, the names went down too. (The donors were given bronze plaques in the lobby of the new Guggenheim Pavilion.)
And when Princeton University tore down its beloved Palmer Memorial Stadium in 1997 to build a $45 million version, the Palmer name disappeared as well, victim of a naming opportunity priced at about $25 million (no takers so far). Even worse, the Palmers might crumble again when Palmer Hall, once the university's physics building, becomes part of the new Frist Campus Center. Perpetuity, it seems, has its limits.
Sun-Sentinel
Copyright 1998 Sun-Sentinel Company (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
December 27, 1998, SundaySECTION: EDITORIAL
HEADLINE: THOMAS' COLUMN ON VOUCHERS ONE-SIDED AND INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST
Any discussion of school vouchers should include an honest appraisal of both sides of the issue. Unfortunately, Cal Thomas' column (Nov. 13 ) not only offers a one-sided view of vouchers, but also an intellectually dishonest one as well. Thomas claims "a Harvard study" of the Milwaukee voucher program shows improved reading and math skills, when in fact, the official study of the Milwaukee program -- conducted by Professor John Witte of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee -- found the voucher experiment has produced no significant improvement in student achievement.
Thomas should have mentioned Milwaukee's class-size reduction program, serving 2,400 public school students. Research by Princeton University's Cecelia Rouse shows its students outperforming voucher students in reading, and doing just as well in math. …
BOB CHASE Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
December 26, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: OBITUARIES
Hugh Nevin Scott, World Bank Official
Hugh Nevin Scott, 70, who retired as associate general counsel of the World Bank in 1993, died of cancer Dec. 23 at a hospital in New York. He lived in Washington and had homes in Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., and Naples, Fla.
Mr. Scott joined the World Bank in 1956, and helped put together financing for projects such as the Kariba Dam in Zambia. Colleagues said he also played a key role in the establishment of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, which insures investments against risks in developing countries. He served as acting general counsel of the bank in the 1980s.
Mr. Scott was a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He served in the Army. …
The Commercial Appeal
Copyright 1998 Southeastern Newspapers Corporation (Memphis, TN)
December 24, 1998HEADLINE: CIA HUSHED SATELLITE BRIBERY IN CHINA, OFFICIALS SAY
BYLINE: Jeff Gerth The New York Times News ServiceDATELINE: WASHINGTON
CIA officers in China told headquarters in March 1996 that a consultant for an American aerospace company had made payments to Chinese officials in hopes of getting lucrative contracts, U.S. intelligence officials say.
The allegation, made in a secret cable, should have set off alarm bells. U. S. law bars companies or individuals from paying bribes overseas to secure contracts, and the CIA has agreed to share information about potential criminal activity with the Justice Department.
But for reasons that remain unclear, the cable languished in CIA files for more than two years, the officials told The New York Times. It was unearthed this year only after congressional committees began examining whether the Clinton administration had compromised national security in its zeal to promote high technology exports to China, the officials told the Times.
The consultant is Bansang Lee, a Chinese-American who worked for Hughes Space & Communications and Loral Space & Communications. …
Lee was born in China but educated in the United States, receiving a doctorate from Princeton University in electrical engineering. Industry executives say he was a crucial intermediary between American companies and Chinese aerospace officials who on one hand were buying Western satellites and on the other hand marketing their country's ability to launch these satellites with China's rockets. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 24, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: On-Line Samurai Transform an Ancient Game
BYLINE: By KATIE HAFNERTHE Asian board game of Go was the game of the samurai. Among noble accomplishments for Chinese gentlemen, Go ranked with calligraphy, poetry and music. For centuries, Go has been used as a tool to teach military strategy. It is the game from which Japanese businessmen draw metaphors.
Now Go is on the Internet, and the ancient game's relatively sudden encounter with modernity has produced a microcosm of the tension that exists between virtual worlds and the real one.
Go players can now log onto a computer and play 24 hours a day. The advent of on-line Go has erased barriers of language and distance, while lifting the game from obscurity in the United States. At the same time, the on-line version of the game comes at the expense of many traditions surrounding its play. In this country, some local Go clubs, the lifeblood of the Go-playing world, are suffering a decline in membership as more people play from their homes via computer. …
Whether on line or off, Go playing is likely to remain human to human for many years to come. Unlike chess, Go has yet to succumb to the computational muscle that helped Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat the world's best chess player in 1997. An expert Go-playing computer program must be able not only to analyze moves but also to recognize complex patterns. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a fan of the game, said it could be several decades before a computer could beat an expert human player at Go.
I.G.S. isn't for everyone. For one thing, Internet connections are still expensive in some parts of Asia, especially China, where 20 to 30 people often share one I.G.S. account. For elderly retirees in Japan, who are among Go's most avid players and have no trouble finding an opponent, the Internet is not just unwanted but unnecessary.
For others, like Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist at Princeton University, I.G.S. is simply a bad fit. Dr. Anderson has played Go for 45 years and began playing on line four years ago. "I find playing on the Net very frustrating because I don't visualize patterns well on the small screen," he said. "And I think I play a couple of ranks below my true strength as judged by nonvirtual games." …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 24, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Arts Endowment's Point Man in Design
BYLINE: By By JULIE V. IOVINEAFTER years under Congressional siege -- and a spring rally by conservatives to annihilate it -- the National Endowment for the Arts, whose budget was finally secured in September, may understandably be looking for steady ground to tread. But under a new chairman, William J. Ivey, who has said he believes the endowment should be as important as the Department of Defense, the N.E.A. is marching, not slinking, to the front lines in its support of the arts.
On Tuesday, Mr. Ivey announced the appointment of Mark Robbins, a curator, teacher and artist, as the new design director, a post that has been vacant for more than a year. …
As an installation artist, Mr. Robbins has contributed to what are known as gender studies, a loosely defined area of inquiry that's been popular on campuses since the early 1990's. Ralph Lerner, the dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, described gender studies as "a waning subject in architectural discourse," which, he added, had "helped us think about a lot of things in fresh ways, including domesticity and the relationship between architecture and the state of women and minorities in society."
National Public Radio
SHOW: NPR TALK OF THE NATION
DECEMBER 24, 1998, THURSDAYHEADLINE: Heroes
BYLINE: Ray Suarez, Washington DCRAY SUAREZ, HOST: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Ray Suarez.
American heroes this hour. To here some people tell it, one of the worst offenses against the national psyche committed by Bill Clinton in having an affair with Monica Lewinsky was not being heroic, not living up to the imaginary place we reserve for larger-than-life characters like presidents. The president has hurt many people not so much by being who he is, but by not being who it is demanded a president must be.
Our heroes come in all shapes and sizes, and with staying power of many different durations. They can be people who rise above the limitations of day-to-day life to do one brave, incredibly self- sacrificial thing. Think of the teacher who lost her life shielding children in Jonesboro, Arkansas, or people who build entire lives which add up to heroism, maybe someone like Nelson Mandela. …
SUAREZ: And Sean Wilentz is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University, and director of the American studies program there. He's written widely on the history of American politics and society. …
WILENTZ: Oh, I certainly have contemporary heroes. One in particular, John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia, who matches every definition -- his life matches every definition of hero that you could concoct; putting his life on the line time after time after time in the Civil Rights movement; going on to be a national political leader.
But I think there's a point to all of this about dead heroes and live heroes, because I think that every generation of Americans has the same crisis or the same problem of wondering where the heroes are now, seeing all the heroes as having been in the past. It's something that every generation does. Ours is no different; we're in a state of, what, hero panic. We're looking for heroes; we don't find them; they all seem to be in the past. …
USA TODAY
Copyright 1998 Gannett Company, Inc.
December 24, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Amazon.com amazes On-line gamble pays off with rocketing success
BYLINE: Doug LevyDATELINE: SEATTLE
SEATTLE -- Jeff Bezos is busily stocking shelves with just-delivered videos while scores of other people scurry around the 86,000-square-foot warehouse pulling orders and sending them to arrive in time for Christmas.
The 34-year-old CEO of Amazon.com is working well into the night, alongside the twentysomethings he commands. It's a daily ritual for him and his fellow executives during the holiday rush. "Work hard, have fun, make history," Bezos (pronounced BAY-zohs) tells them, punctuating his sentences with an infectious laugh.
Working hard is indeed what these people were doing the Sunday before Christmas in one of Amazon.com's two U.S. distribution centers. Hundreds of thousands of books (exactly how many is a trade secret) are unloaded from tractor-trailers on the building's south end. Within 24 hours, nearly all will be on trailers on the north end awaiting delivery to customers. Then the process begins again. A second center, more than twice the size, duplicates the process in Delaware….
Education: Graduated summa cum laude in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University in 1986.
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
December 24, 1998 ThursdayHEADLINE: ROBERT L. GLANZ
Robert L. Glanz, 93, a former real estate attorney who lived for many years in Winnetka, died Nov. 25 in his home in Sun City Center, Fla. Born in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, Mr. Glanz was a graduate of the Latin School in Chicago and Princeton University in New Jersey, said his son, Don. After graduating from Princeton in 1927, Mr. Glanz went to work with the family business, Glanz Mortgage Co. in Chicago, overseeing mortgages and financial transactions. …
Health Line
Copyright 1998 The National Journal Group, Inc.
December 23, 1998SECTION: TRENDS & TIMELINES
HEADLINE: HEALTH MAINTENANCE: 25 YEARS IN REVIEWToday's Journal of the American Medical Association takes a look at changes in health care since President Nixon brought managed care to the national stage with the HMO Act of 1973. …
o Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt said, "HMO is misnomer. Most don't engage in health maintenance. The tenure of the enrollee isn't long enough to make those upfront investments worthwhile." But Ellwood predicts that won't last. He said, "The next phase of the evolution will involve another power shift. This time consumers and patients will gain the upper hand by exercising choices based on objective comparisons of quality"
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 22, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Where Does the Time Go? Forward, Physics Shows
BYLINE: By MALCOLM W. BROWNEIn Lewis Carroll's mirror world of "Through the Looking Glass," it seems perfectly logical that the White Queen, who lives backward, first bandages her finger, then begins to bleed, then screams, and finally pricks her finger. On paper, if not in real life, the physics governing many natural phenomena permit time to run either forward, like a swimmer jumping from a diving board, or backward, like a reversed movie in which the swimmer leaps from the water and lands on the board.
But since a landmark experiment in 1964 by Dr. James W. Cronin and Dr. Val L. Fitch, both at Princeton University at the time, physicists have known that time reversal is not so neat in the microscopic world of particles. They found indirect but convincing evidence that sometimes a particle going backward in time fails to land on the metaphorical diving board; in other words, time, they found, could not be perfectly symmetrical.
Experimenters have now achieved direct confirmation of this unsettling inference.
To no one's surprise, physicists at two big particle accelerators, one in Switzerland and the other in Illinois, proved that when certain particles go backward in time, their behavior is somewhat different from what it is when they go forward.
If this sounds baffling to non-scientists, they are not alone; a member of the Nobel committee who sat on the panel that awarded Dr. Cronin and Dr. Fitch the 1980 prize in physics remarked, "It would take a new Einstein to say what it means." …
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Copyright 1998 San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News
December 22, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: California Judge Orders Microsoft to Stop Blocking Rival's Greeting Cards
BYLINE: By Miguel HelftMicrosoft Corp. was told Monday to get into the holiday spirit.
A Santa Clara County superior court judge ordered the software giant to ensure that the next generation of its Internet browsing and mail software does not discard a competitor's electronic greeting cards as junk e-mail. Blue Mountain Arts, a small Boulder, Colo., company, had sued Microsoft accusing it of unfairly rigging its software when Microsoft launched its own electronic greeting card.
The suit, filed earlier this month, is the latest in a series of accusations against Microsoft claiming the company used its market dominance to cripple a competitor's product in an effort to stifle competition. …
Earlier this year, Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks Inc., told a U.S. Senate committee that Microsoft had disabled RealNetwork's popular software for delivering audio and video over the Internet in order to promote its own competing technology. Apple Computer executives have also accused Microsoft of altering its Windows operating system to disable Apple's QuickTime multimedia software. Apple's charges figure prominently in the government's antitrust suit against Microsoft.
And Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor and witness in the antitrust trial, accused Microsoft of sabotaging a program he wrote to gather evidence against the company. …
SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE
Copyright 1998 South Bend Tribune Corporation
December 21, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Study: Rate of brain loss in elderly small
BYLINE: LEE BOWMAN; Scripps Howard News ServiceConventional wisdom, even among most neurologists, has been that brain tissue declines markedly the older one gets, and especially beyond middle age.
But a study by researchers at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland challenges that notion with the discovery that healthy 85-year-olds lose brain tissue no faster than healthy 65-year-olds.
"We found that even though healthy people do lose brain tissue as they age, the rate of the brain's shrinking can stay relatively constant, and relatively small, well into the 90s and beyond," said Dr. Jeff Kaye, director of the Aging and Alzheimer Center at the university and the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He is the lead author of the study, reported today in the journal Neurology. …
Earlier this year, researchers at Rockefeller University in New York and Princeton University found that monkeys are constantly making new cells in at least one key region, the hippocampus, which is used for converting short-term memory to long-term memory. …
The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL)
Copyright 1998 The Florida Times-Union
December 21, 1998 MondayHEADLINE: Historians see more ugliness for presidency
BYLINE: Knight-Tribune News ServicePHILADELPHIA -- What does President Clinton's impeachment mean for America's future?
Many historians and political scientists see Saturday's vote by the House as a step that could lead to a seriously malfunctioning government in coming years.
Why?
The business of the people -- and the workings of democracy -- could be sidelined by national leaders obsessed with pulling new 'gotchas' as they get even for old ones.
If that occurs, academics say, the office of the presidency is likely to be further weakened, the image of Congress further tainted, and the public's respect for elected leaders further diminished. …
'The politicians are acting as if they're Bosnians and Serbs,' said Fred Greenstein, a political science professor at Princeton University.
Greenstein said the feuding and backbiting could have a deeply destructive effect. 'There is an enormous lowering of the threshold to go for impeachment,' he said. 'That produces a lot of volatility and makes it harder to plan and solve big problems like Social Security.' …
Industry Week
Copyright 1998 Penton/IPC
December 21, 1998HEADLINE: R & D STARS TO WATCH
BYLINE: By Jennifer Bowen, Vivian Pospisil, and John TereskoHIGHLIGHT: IW SELECTS 50 INDIVIDUALS WHOSE ACHIEVEMENTS ARE SHAPING THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY.
Robert B. Laughlin, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; Horst L. Stormer, Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., and Columbia University, New York; and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. The three scientists, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in physics, also are presently or formerly affiliated with Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent Technologies, where they conducted experimental research in quantum physics in the 1980s. They discovered that electrons, when exposed to extreme cold and magnetic fields, behave more like fluids than particles. Potential applications include smaller, faster electronics.
Stephen Forrest, chairman, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, and Paul Burrows, senior research scholar, Center for Photonics & Optoelectronic Materials, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.; and Mark Thompson, associate professor of chemistry, University of Southern California, formerly of Princeton. The group of inventors received a patent for their work at Princeton on flat-panel displays. Their breakthrough is based on the concept of placing red, green, and blue subpixels in a vertical stack, thus requiring one-third the usual space and producing three times greater resolution. For their work the researchers won the Intellectual Property Owners Assn.'s 1998 Distinguished Inventor Award.
National Review
Copyright 1998 National Review Inc.
December 21, 1998HEADLINE: The Jewish Question; Review; book reviews
BYLINE: DiIulio, John J., Jr.Mr. DiIulio, a professor at Princeton University and a frequent contributor to NR, directs The Jeremiah Project at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy, by David Klinghoffer (Free Press, 272 pp., $24)
LIKE any true Orthodox Jew, David Klinghoffer, age 33, believes that his disembodied soul stood at Mt. Sinai and "that Torah is entirely Truth, that it came from God, that it is His presence in our lives." But the story of how Klinghoffer, a senior editor of NR, came to seek knowledge of God and Torah is undoubtedly unlike that of any other Orthodox Jew. The Lord Will Gather Me In is his intimate and classic tale of spiritual self-discovery and religious rebirth, a book so entertaining, intelligent, and compelling that it is must reading for thinking, morally alive persons of every faith and of no faith. Klinghoffer was begat in California by a bookish yet beautiful gentile woman from Sweden and an unsavory gentile gent from Kansas who deserted her. David's unwed mother, Harriet Lund, had grown up "a neglected girl who happened to know Jewish families in which the children were doted on as she was not." She bore her blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, selecting Paul and Carol Klinghoffer, Reform Jews, as his adoptive parents. The Klinghoffers proved to be kind, caring, morally upright parents.
But from the first chapter of The Lord Will Gather Me In, it is clear that Klinghoffer's by turns intellectually fascinating, devilishly funny, and spiritually challenging journey to Jewish orthodoxy was encouraged neither by his adoptive parents nor by most of the Jewish friends, relatives, and rabbis who knew him from childhood through his graduation from Brown University. Rather, his journey began in youthful rebellion against what he experienced as the anything-goes, Torah Lite ways of secular and "easygoing Reform Jews." By the last pages of the book, Klinghoffer makes plain his conviction that his journey to Orthodox Judaism was led throughout by the Lord, who chose to gather him in among the children of Israel and (so I would add) to inspire him to record the motivating ideas and general arguments, the embarrassing and uplifting personal details, of his journey.
How did it happen? At age five, David was told by his adoptive parents that his biological parents were gentiles. In eighth grade, he opened a book given to him by his maternal grandmother, To Be a Jew, by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin. The book introduced the boy to the Orthodox understanding of halakha, the body of Jewish laws derived from the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and its traditional interpretations (the Oral Torah). He was struck by "one of the most unexpected sentences of my reading life: 'A child born to a non-Jewish mother, regardless of who the father is, has the status of a non-Jew according to Jewish law.' " …
Klinghoffer "reached the conclusion that Judaism is true" even though several Christians-including a Catholic girl he almost married-had courted him for Christ. …
Different as they are, however, Judaism and Christianity in their orthodox manifestations are not only joined at the hip theologically ("If nothing happened at Sinai, both religions are frauds" writes Klinghoffer), but one in opposing so-called mainstream religions that blink or wink at Biblical injunctions against abortion, sex outside of marriage, and more. Klinghoffer suggests that Reform Judaism and other liberal religions are crashing while Orthodox Judaism, born-again Protestantism, and old-school Catholicism are expanding because the latter speak authoritatively about God, stir souls, and keep them stirred by stressing daily prayer and other religious habits. …
The San Diego Union-Tribune
Copyright 1998 The San Diego Union-Tribune
December 21, 1998, MondayHEADLINE: Cultural clash propelled GOP; Clinton embodies what many despise
SOURCE: COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
BYLINE: George E. Condon Jr. WASHINGTONWASHINGTON -- The talk during the debate was about history and the Constitution. But, to a surprising extent, much of what was behind the Republican drive toward impeachment was both personal and cultural.
In a very real sense, the impeachment of President Clinton was the culmination of a cultural rift that began in the 1960s and today has a Congress increasingly divided between Democrats and Republicans championing very divergent value systems.
More than any president since Richard Nixon provoked visceral hatred from a generation of Democrats, Clinton engenders an intense dislike from his political foes. That antipathy kept the impeachment push alive when it seemed to be lagging last month and helped fuel the pressure from the Republican grass roots to keep GOP moderates in line for the vote Saturday. …
Fred Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton University, witnessed the same phenomenon, attributing Clinton's impeachment partly to the president's "incompetence and self-indulgence" and partly to the "growing role of lifestyle conservatives" in the GOP.
"Clinton is such a red flag to these people" in a party increasingly filled with evangelical born-again conservatives, he said.
"Clinton is the first baby boomer (to be president) ... with photos of him as a bearded war protester, his (college) letter about 'loathing' the military and the clips of Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones," Greenstein said. …
Albuquerque Journal
Copyright 1998 Albuquerque Journal
December 20, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Tritium Program Big-Bucks Decision
BYLINE: Ian Hoffman Journal Staff WriterN.M. One of 6 States Seeking Part of Project
One reason U.S. nuclear weapons are the most efficient killing devices on Earth is a radioactive gas called tritium.
It is the most expensive stuff on the planet, priced at roughly $50,000 a gram.
It's also perishable. Half of the gas decays every 12.4 years, so nuclear weapons must be refilled to keep their hydrogen-bomb punch.
In the next week, Bill Richardson will make one of his heftiest decisions as secretary of Energy: How will the nation make enough tritium for its nuclear arsenal? …
Today's U.S. arsenal of about 8,500 fielded weapons needs no fresh tritium until late 2009. Add a decade if arms-control treaties or Russia's rapidly deteriorating nuclear forces allow the United States to cut its arsenal in half. Still deeper cuts could delay the need for new tritium as late as 2075.
"We don't need it," said physicist Frank von Hippel, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University.
"The current debate over tritium requirements is completely artificial, driven by hungry nuclear contractors and politicians eager for new, multi-billion facilities and by hawks obstinately ignoring the decay rate of Russia's nuclear arsenal," wrote von Hippel and colleague Charles Ferguson of the Federation of American Scientists in a recent Defense News editorial. …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 20, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Princeton impeachment opponent withstands withering reviews
BYLINE: By LAURENCE ARNOLD, Associated Press WriterDATELINE: WASHINGTON
For a few days in the midst of a presidential crisis, historian Sean Wilentz was to Princeton University what legendary box-office disaster "Ishtar" was to Hollywood.
Panned by the pundits as a condescending and arrogant Ivy League interloper, Wilentz withstood withering criticism of his anti-impeachment presentation before the House Judiciary Committee.
Time magazine mocked his "high-pitched, insinuating voice." The Washington Post noted his "peachy skin" and "once modish haircut" and, in a post-mortem to the hearings, named him "Most Likely to Have His Taxes Audited." …
"I've gotten my share of hate mail," he says, "but when one takes a strong stand on an issue as delicate as this one, one expects that kind of thing."
Wilentz, the director of Princeton's Program in American Studies, vaulted into the middle of national controversy on Dec. 8 when he testified before the judiciary committee as part of a panel assembled by the White House.
Some committee Republicans recoiled as Wilentz told them history will be harsh on those who try to force Clinton from office.
Those who vote for impeachment risk "going down in history with the zealots and the fanatics," he said.
And he warned those who would vote for impeachment for the sake of making a statement: "history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness."
Republican Rep. George Gekas of Pennsylvania told Wilentz, "I think that's a despicable way to characterize, in advance, our possible vote." With no help from Democrats, committee Republicans went on to approve four articles of impeachment. …
The Herald
Copyright 1998 McClatchy Newspapers Inc. (Rock Hill, S.C.)
December 20, 1998 SundayHEADLINE: Senate trial would favor Clinton
BYLINE: By MICHAEL HEDGES Scripps Howard News ServiceWASHINGTON - With the House voting to impeach President Clinton, he now faces the prospect of a trial in the Senate as early as January.
If convicted by the Senate of the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice passed by the House, Clinton would be removed from office. Vice President Al Gore would then become president.
In partisan terms, Clinton appears to have the advantage in the Senate. There are 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats. It takes a two-thirds vote - 67 senators - to remove a president from office. …
That humbling of a president could become a metaphor of an era of reduced presidential power after Clinton - the true legacy of his impeachment, scholars said.
Sean Wilentz, a history professor from Princeton University, said even impeaching Clinton - much less convicting him in the Senate - could "repeat the weakening of the presidency that occurred between (Andrew) Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, resulting in a list of presidents no one can name." …
Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company
December 20, 1998, Sunday, Home EditionHEADLINE: IMPEACHMENT/NEWS ANALYSIS; CLINTON ASSURED OF DUBIOUS SPOT IN HISTORY;
BYLINE: DOYLE McMANUS, TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
DATELINE: WASHINGTONBill Clinton has long mused in private about the legacy his presidency will leave: Would he be remembered like Theodore Roosevelt, who led America confidently into a new century, or John F. Kennedy, who instilled an ethos of public service in a generation?
On Saturday, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives ensured that Clinton will be compared instead to a less inspiring predecessor: Andrew Johnson, the only other president to be impeached.
"A hundred years from now, this will undoubtedly be the first sentence in the paragraph that is given over to him," said historian Stephen E. Ambrose.
Clinton can still claim other achievements: moving the Democratic Party toward the center, joining with Republicans to balance the budget and enact welfare reform--but none is as clearly defined as the dark stain of impeachment. …
Even more unkindly: "He'll be remembered as a kind of low-achieving Nixon," said Fred Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton University. "He'll be remembered for reorienting the Democratic Party away from big government. But he'll also be remembered for this scandal, as a president who was brought down by a young woman who flashed her underwear." …
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
December 20, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: Reality Meets Rhetoric on an Unpredictable Course for Nation
BYLINE: Dan Balz; David S. Broder, Washington Post Staff WritersIn an atmosphere of partisan rancor, Washington yesterday confronted a leadership crisis that has infected two branches of government -- and could soon spread to the third.
On the same day that President Clinton became the first chief executive in 130 years to be impeached by the House of Representatives, resignation forced the second vacancy in the House speakership in barely a month. Speaker-designate Bob Livingston (R-La.), in line to succeed Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), stunned his colleagues by stepping aside and challenging the president to do the same thing. …
But filling the leadership vacuum that exists in Washington will be difficult unless something changes the current atmosphere. "Is there a point where enough political actors can pull together and others can wake up out of their nightmare and say this is a bad dream?" asked presidential scholar Fred Greenstein of Princeton University. "There's no way of knowing."
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
December 20, 1998, SundayHEADLINE: It's Come To This: A Nickname That's Proven Hard to Slip; The Saga of 'Slick Willie,' From Parody to Burden
BYLINE: Kevin Merida, Washington Post Staff Writer
Eighteen years ago, in a tiny town in a small Southern state, a man was given a nickname. The nickname grew into a national image and the image became a parody. The parody left an impression and the impression never went away. It became an identity, a burden, a weakness. The weakness was exploited by the man's opponents, and yesterday the man was impeached.
The nickname: Slick Willie. …
"The fact that he is so slick means he can turn on a dime," says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University. "He's got the most amazing resilience that we've ever seen in American politics.
"You keep thinking that this time he's gone. Like the cat's going to catch the mouse in 'Tom & Jerry.' Like finally Charlie Brown is going to kick the football." …
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 1998 The Baltimore Sun Company
December 19, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: William Reed, 82, president of marine supply company
William Lord Reed, the retired president of a Baltimore marine supply company and a former World War II Army captain, died of pneumonia at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center on Thursday, his 82nd birthday.
A native of Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Reed lived most of his life in Lutherville.
He attended Princeton University and served in the Army during World War II. He was discharged as a captain in the late 1940s. …
The Economist
Copyright 1998 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
December 19, 1998HEADLINE: Journey beyond the stars
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
The brightest young economists are outgrowing their discipline's traditional boundaries
TEN years ago The Economist published an article about the eight best young economists in the world; academics in their mid-30s or younger who had already achieved star status within their profession. Gratifyingly, the decade since has seen these men--and they were all men--achieve a great deal beyond the groves of academe. Three are household names, at least in households that take a financial newspaper.
This talent for picking winners encouraged us to try to repeat the exercise. …
Theory becomes applied
These five economists illustrate both today's economic imperialism and the trend towards a mingling of theory and empirical work. Other top young researchers have remained more clearly in a single camp. Glenn Ellison of MIT is widely regarded as one of the brightest theorists of his generation. He has made his name with highly sophisticated theoretical work in game theory and in models of the learning process. But, in keeping with today's trend towards mingling theory and numbers, he has al papers. His recent work with Judith Chevalier (of the University of Chicago Business School) suggests that young mutual-fund managers are fired more quickly for bad performance than older ones: hence they are more susceptible to herd-like behaviour.
Other theorists build models to understand politics. Wolfgang Pesendorfer, for instance, an applied theoretical economist at Princeton University, together with Timothy Feddersen of the Kellogg School of Business, has come up with an intriguing theory about why people choose not to vote on particular items on a ballot-sheet. The traditional economist's explanation for not voting is that it is costly to vote, but that hardly applies if you are already in the ballot box. Instead, Mr Pesendorfer suggests that there is a "swing voter's curse" analogous to the "winner's curse" familiar from the economics of auctions. …
The National Journal
Copyright 1998 The National Journal, Inc.
December 19, 1998HEADLINE: What Becomes a Legend Most?
BYLINE: William PowersJournalists are great egoists, certain that momentous historic events are constantly erupting in the immediate vicinity of their persons. They tend to believe that they must immediately spread the news of these impressive happenings to the world, which might otherwise perish. Thus, historic is one of the craft's most promiscuous adjectives, and more than a few journalists have been known to assure reluctant sources that the desired interview is not just for tomorrow's news (pah!) but for what Ezra Pound called ''the first draft of history,'' which sounds so much more glamorous. …
The President himself is an authentic expert on presidential history--the most knowledgeable on the subject among 20th-century Presidents, according to historian Michael R. Beschloss. ''Clinton has read all the books and is very familiar with why one President is up and another is down,'' says Beschloss. The White House even sent a sympathetic historian, Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, where he channeled the frosty voice of History Future and threatened committee Republicans with the specter of ''going down in history with the zealots and the fanatics.''
Wilentz' statement is useful, not so much for its audacious soothsaying, which runs its own risk of zealotry. It's useful because it reminds us that, in fact, the history game is wide open, and the outcomes we casually assume--if A, Clinton wins; if B, he loses--may not obtain. …
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 19, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: THINK TANK; To the Barricades, 25 Years Later
BYLINE: By Patricia Cohen"All the legitimacy of a coup d'etat," is how the novelist E. L. Doctorow described the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton at a rally of artists and intellectuals at New York University this week.
For months, he and hundreds of other prominent scholars and literary figures, including Toni Morrison, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Ronald Dworkin, William Styron, Arthur Miller and Jane Smiley, have been writing articles, taking out advertisements, signing petitions and testifying before Congress on the folly of the investigation of President Clinton.
Not since the Vietnam War and Watergate, they say, have so many tried to use their prestige to influence the country's politics. …
Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University who helped organize the New York University rally and testified before the House Judiciary Committee, said: "It's the President. That makes all the difference in the world. We haven't had this type of national political psychodrama since Watergate." …
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
December 19, 1998, SaturdayHEADLINE: Chinese Crackdown Mixes Repression With Freedom
BYLINE: John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign ServiceDATELINE: BEIJING, Dec. 18
With trials against dissidents in two cities completed on Thursday and a tough statement by President Jiang Zemin lambasting Western-style democracy today, China has sent an important message to its people: If you organize political dissent, you will go to jail.
This month's crackdown on a broad-based attempt to form China's first opposition party and Jiang's vow never to copy Western political systems have raised questions here about the scope of the latest salvo against dissent, the biggest in two years, in the world's last Communist giant. …
"I don't think this marks a turning point, suggesting that the Chinese system is closing up," said Pei Minxin, an expert on China's political system at Princeton University. "The crackdown is a typical two steps forward and one step back." …
The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
December 18, 1998, FridayHEADLINE: Clinton's former chief of staff returns to private life
BYLINE: By PAUL NOWELL, Associated Press WriterDATELINE: CHARLOTTE
Far away from having to deal with his old boss's possible impeachment and bombing Iraq, former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles kept a notably low profile on his first day back in the private sector.
Rejecting requests for interviews, Bowles showed up for work as planned Thursday at Carousel Capital, the merchant banking firm he left two years ago at the request of his friend, Bill Clinton.
"He's doing all the things any new employee would be doing, meeting everyone on the staff and finding the coffee pot," said a staffer at the firm, which moved into new offices in the Interstate/Johnson Lane tower following Bowles' departure in November 1996. …
His wife, Crandall, is president and chief executive officer at textile maker Springs Industries in nearby Rock Hill, S.C.
The couple has two children at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a son at Princeton University.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1998 The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: Gifts & Bequests
Princeton University. For expansion of McCarer Theatre: $3.5-million from Roger S. Berlind.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1998 The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: Embittered by a Bleak Job Market, Graduate Students Take On the MLA
BYLINE: COURTNEY LEATHERMAN and ROBIN WILSONHundreds of graduate students will pour into the annual convention of the Modern Language Association this month, but they won't just be looking for jobs or chances to play up to academe's heavy hitters. They'll be looking to take on the M.L.A.'s leadership, if not take it over.
Frustrated by a bleak academic job market and by what they view as the association's lame response, a growing caucus of graduate students is poised for a confrontation with M.L.A. leaders at the San Francisco convention. The looming showdown, some professors say, is reminiscent of protests that disrupted the national meeting 30 years ago, when female and minority professors accused the association of elitism.
Behind the campaign is the M.L.A.'s Graduate Student Caucus, whose membership has soared in the last few years, from about 20 students in 1995 to nearly 5,000 today. Within the association, graduate students now make up 27 per cent of the membership, and are pushing for a greater voice in the way the group is run. …
The deterioration of the academic job market in the 1990s has left Ph.D. students in the humanities fearful that, after years of training, they will be unable to find tenure-track positions. As universities have increasingly replaced full-time jobs with part-time ones, caucus leaders say, the M.L.A. has not done enough to counter the trend, and has focused too much on urging doctoral recipients to look outside of higher education for work. That advice has incensed students and their supporters within the professoriate. …
In their anxiety over the job market, graduate students have miscast the M.L.A. as the enemy, says Elaine C. Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University who herself has been cast as Public Enemy No. 1 during her one-year term as the association's president. She and other M.L.A. leaders say they know how bad the job market is. "I am very committed to the idea that the humanities need regeneration, that graduate education is out of touch with reality, and that the Ph.D. has become too narrow," says Ms. Showalter. …
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1998 The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: Riley Urges Colleges Not to Raise Tuition or Lower Aid in Response to Tax Credits
BYLINE: STEPHEN BURDWarning that the new federal tuition tax breaks should "not be shifted from families to colleges and universities," Education Secretary Richard W. Riley has called on college and state leaders not to raise tuitions or lower the amount of financial aid they give to students receiving those benefits.
"I urge colleges, universities, and State legislatures to follow our lead in ensuring that the new tax credits truly reduce families' college expenses," Mr. Riley wrote in a letter to college presidents this month. …
Leaders of some private colleges have advocated reducing the financial aid they give to students who receive the tax breaks, arguing that those students are better off than their poorer classmates who did not receive the tax credits. Many low-income families do not earn enough to owe taxes, and, therefore, students in those families cannot take advantage of the credits. Other institutions, like Princeton University, have rejected that view, recognizing that it was the intent of the President and Congress to provide relief for middle-income students and their parents (The Chronicle, January 9). …
Health Line
Copyright 1998 The National Journal Group, Inc.
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I have no problem with cloning. I think cloning is not going to have a big effect on humankind. This hullabaloo will die down when people realize we just get babies."-- Princeton University biologist Lee Silver
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: Microsoft Says It Didn't Alter Internet Site
BYLINE: By JOEL BRINKLEYDATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 17
Stung by a Government witness's testimony that the Microsoft Corporation had sabotaged a program designed to gather evidence against the company, lawyers for the software giant today offered the court an unusual written explanation.
Central to the issue are on-line updates, a feature introduced with Windows 98 in June, whereby users who are connected to the Internet receive a "critical update" message when they turn on their computers whenever Microsoft has fixed some bug or made some improvement to the operating system. By clicking on a button, the user downloads the new code from a special Web site, and it is instantly installed automatically.
On Monday, the witness, Edward Felten, a computer-scientist from Princeton University, testified that Microsoft had made changes to its Windows 98 update site that seemed designed to thwart a computer program he had written todemonstrate a central point in the Government's antitrust suit against the company -- that Microsoft's browser could be removed from Windows.
Dr. Felten testified that soon after he gave Microsoft a copy of his program in September as part of the pretrial discovery rules, his computer would no longer work with the update site. …In its filing today, Microsoft did not explain what had caused the problem but denied doing anything that would have caused it.
The company said that the site was updated regularly, roughly every two weeks, adding that an update was first posted on Nov. 4 and modified slightly on Dec. 4 "by a single developer working under the supervision of another developer."
"Neither of these developers," the company said, "had access to Dr. Felten's program, and neither was involved in any way in Microsoft's testing of his program. The Dec. 4 change had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr. Felten or his program. Microsoft knows of no reason why that change should have affected Dr. Felten's program and believes it had no such effect." …
The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1998 Bergen Record Corp.
December 18, 1998HEADLINE: WASHINGTON SHIFTS PRIORITIES FOR A DAY
BYLINE: THOMAS J. FITZGERALD, Staff WriterDATELINE: WASHINGTON
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. was weighing aloud the impeachment of the president, his hands splayed wide to punctuate a point, when he stopped in mid-thought. He was distracted.
"Hold on a minute. I want to watch the war,"said Pascrell, D-Paterson, fiddling with a remote control to punch up the sound of a CNN broadcast.
Baghdad, cast a bilious green by the network's night-vision cameras, was rocked by explosions, and the antiaircraft tracers seemed to be just outside the wood-paneled office in the Longworth House Office Building.
"There's something weird about watching the bombing on television,
something surrealistic,"Pascrell said."It's frightening."
Many people on Capitol Hill seemed dazed Thursday, suffering the intellectual and emotional equivalent of whiplash. The House of Representatives had been poised to begin debating four counts of impeachment against President Clinton, but the bombing campaign against Iraq, launched Wednesday night, blew the historic question off the agenda. …
Ted Cox, a Princeton University biology professor who came to join the rally with his wife, Carol, said that confusion because of events in Iraq may have contributed to the low turnout. He could not find out whether the demonstration was still on, but he decided to come anyway.
"The Republicans in Congress have an all-consuming desire to destroy Clinton,"Cox said."They hate him for reasons that escape me. I suppose he has betrayed them by lying to them, but I've never seen a president who didn't."He said the last big Washington protest he attended, against the Vietnam War, pointed up the absurdity of the Lewinsky case. …
Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 1998 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
December 17, 1998, THURSDAYHEADLINE: Frank Stover, retired Sears executive
Frank C. Stover, a Sears, Roebuck and Co. executive who oversaw construction of the company's exhibit for the 1933 Century of Progress world's fair in Chicago, died Sunday at the Hospice of the North Shore in Evanston. He was 90.
Mr. Stover graduated from New Trier High School and earned degrees from Princeton University and the University of Illinois. He lived in Winnetka for most of his life. …
Investor's Business Daily
Copyright 1998 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
December 17, 1998HEADLINE: Death And Taxes
If you want to know whether someone is liberal or conservative, ask what he thinks of the inheritance tax. If he thinks it's a fair way to limit economic privilege, he's a liberal. If he thinks it's an unfair taking of hard-earned income, he's a conservative.
This focus on the inheritance tax's fairness is easy to understand. But it's also a mistake.
Why? Because liberals and conservatives disagree deeply over what's fair. And neither is going to change the other's views.
A better bet is to give up debating the estate tax's fairness and to look instead at its effects.
That's the approach of a new study by the majority staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee (JEC). It focuses not on abstract moral debate, but on economic facts. …
* The estate tax does little to reduce inequality.
The JEC report cites ''Toward an Economic Theory of Income Distribution,'' a book by Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, who was a Clinton appointee to the Federal Reserve Board.
Blinder found, the JEC noted, that ''only about 2% of economic inequality was attributable to the unequal distribution of inherited wealth, leading him to conclude that 'a radical reform of inheritance policies can accomplish comparatively little income redistribution.' ''
The JEC continued: ''Indeed, the measurable effect of the estate tax on inequality is so small that neither the Congressional Budget Office nor the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis even includes the estate tax in its standard analysis of the distribution of the tax burden.''
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 17, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: Speed of Cloning Advances Surprises U.S. Ethics Panel
BYLINE: By GINA KOLATAJust 18 months ago, a national ethics commission recommended to President Clinton that there be a three- to five-year moratorium on human cloning research. The members argued that nothing would be lost by such a ban, since it most likely would take at least that long to know whether cloning could succeed.
But a ban was not approved, and events seem to have proved the commission wrong.
At the time, just one animal, a sheep, had been cloned, after about 400 tries. Now, not only have mice and cows been cloned with seeming ease but doctors at a South Korean fertility clinic report that they have taken the first step toward cloning a human. With that, some say, cloning has moved to a new frontier.
"All the other cloning announcements were from biotech companies or agricultural scientists," Dr. Lee Silver, a molecular geneticist at Princeton University, said. But the Korean announcement, he said, is clear on the motives: "It is in order to have human clones born." …
Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University and chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which advised the President, said: "The main point of our recommendation was not whether it would be three to five years or one to two years or seven to eight years, but it was moral prudence." …
The State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)
Copyright 1998 The State Journal-Register
December 17, 1998, TuesdayLAST-MINUTE GIFT GUIDE
BYLINE: SANDI DOLBEE COPLEY NEWS SERVICEThere, somewhere between Bethlehem and the North Pole, the manger and the shopping malls, lies the great Santa Claus debate for Christians. It's older than Rudolph and more complicated than getting to all the houses around the world in one night.
"There's a range of responses that Christians have had on that," says Leigh Eric Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton University, and author of the new book, "Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays."
"People have complained for about a century that this is Santa Claus Day and we need to get rid of Santa Claus and replace him with Jesus," says Schmidt.
The controversy cuts across conservative and liberal borders.
For conservative Christians, the issue is about focus, says Schmidt. Jesus -- not Santa -- is the reason for the season.
For liberalProtestants and Catholics, it's the contrast between materialism and charity.
"By concentrating on Santa Claus, we get riveted on notions of plenty and abundant gift-giving and consumption, rather than Jesus as a friend of the poor," says Schmidt. …
TULSA WORLD
Copyright 1998 The Tulsa World
December 17, 1998HEADLINE: Ivy League education, going cheap
SOURCE: FROM THE ECONOMISTThe firm with the strongest balance sheet fired the first salvo, announcing discounts for customers. Other industry leaders quickly followed suit.
Regulators, meanwhile, are casting a wary eye for the kind of price-fixing behavior that has already prompted one lawsuit by the Department of Justice.
The software industry? Detroit? No, this is America's elite Ivy League universities.
Princeton, America's richest university, with more than $750,000 in endowment for every student, started it earlier this year. It was concerned that its prices were keeping out clever, poorer kids, so it decided to offer full scholarships for students with family incomes below $40,000, and more aid for those below $90,000.
Shortly afterwards, Yale's president, Richard Levin, announced more aid for middle-income families. …
Now there are stories of students faxing aid offers to competing schools and asking them to be matched. The Harvard University Gazette reported that Harvard sent a letter this spring to all newly admitted students saying: "We expect that some of our students will have particularly attractive offers from the institutions with new aid programs, and those students should not assume that we will not respond."
The most striking thing about this sentence is not its clumsy double negative. It is that Harvard sounds just like an appliance salesman crying, "We will meet or beat any price!"
In the past, the Ivy League universities have not merely avoided vulgar price competition; they have colluded to prevent it. …
In short, the Ivy Leaguers (along with MIT) fixed prices by, for instance, using a common financial-aid formula and agreeing not to award scholarships based solely on merit. In 1991, the Justice Department successfully sued to stop this. …
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Copyright 1998 Telegraph Group Limited (London)
December 16, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: City: Microsoft 'changed system' court told
BYLINE: By Andrew Cave in New YorkMICROSOFT changed its Windows '98 operating system after a computer expert said he could separate it from the company's Internet Explorer browser, the US government's anti-trust trial heard.
Princeton University professor Edward Felten demonstrated his method of separating the software in the Washington courtroom yesterday, prompting Microsoft to say that his program contained problems.
The professor replied that the method had worked well until after he gave his code to Microsoft, adding: "Microsoft modified [Windows '98] on December 4 in a way that made it incompatible."
Outside the court, Microsoft said a preliminary version of Internet Explorer might have caused the problem Mr Felten experienced but it would not have been intentional. A spokesman said Mr Felten had succeeded "disabling" the browser.
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Austin American-Statesman
December 16, 1998HEADLINE: Campus rallies reflect division
Princeton University students calling for the impeachment of President Clinton wave signs to counter an anti-impeachment rally held on campus in Princeton, N.J., on Tuesday. Meanwhile, writer Toni Morrison applauds a speech by fellow Nobel Laureate Eli Weisel at a rally supporting Clinton at New York University on Monday.
The Post and Courier
Copyright 1998 The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
December 16, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Museum to focus on multicultural history, biodiversity
As members of the Charleston Digital project team, we would like to clarify what the new Museum of History and Science will be. There has been misunderstanding from the beginning as to what we are proposing, much of it stemming from the confusion accompanying any truly new concept.
The new museum is a nonprofit, interactive, multimedia museum dedicated to the exploration of history and science.
The museum's first area of historical focus will be the social, political and historical issues surrounding the Civil War. Dr. Marvin Dulaney from the Avery Research Center and the College of Charleston is our historical consultant.
As an interactive museum, we will be offering visitors the chance to explore history from a multicultural perspective through virtual guides: for example, to experience the events of the Civil War through the eyes of a slave, an Irish immigrant, a Confederate soldier, a Southern aristocrat, a Jewish doctor, a freedman, just a few of the many types of citizens who made up the diverse population of Charleston at the time. …
Through digital technology, Charleston students and residents will access these sites and scientists in real time via broadband Internet connections and live video feeds. Charleston's new museum would be the second such partner for the Smithsonian, the first being Princeton University. …
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
December 16, 1998, WednesdayHEADLINE: Task force should look at other nuclear-deterrent options
The Defense Science Board Task Force on Nuclear Deterrence does not seem to be aware that the Cold War is over and that nuclear dangers from Russia are associated with the imminent possibility of a collapse and not with the possibility of a threatening new buildup ("Pentagon asks for nuclear upgrade," Dec. 4).
The panel's reported perception that taking Russian and U.S. missiles off launch-on-warning alert would be "unilateral disarmament" is bizarre.
Insisting that Russia keep its missiles on hair-trigger alert when its control systems are not being maintained and its military is not being paid is the height of irresponsibility. But Russia will not de-alert its missiles unless the United States does.
The panel's reported concern that de-alerting "would undermine deterrence" reveals that it has not bothered to look seriously at detailed de-alerting proposals, such as one that one of us co-authored for the November 1997 issue of Scientific American. According to that proposal, the United States would keep 600 invulnerable nuclear warheads on ballistic-missile submarines at sea. Each warhead is 10 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
It might take 10 hours to prepare all those warheads for launch, but that fact would be small comfort for any nation that was considering attacking the United States.
CHARLES FERGUSON, Research analyst
Federation of American Scientists
WashingtonFRANK VON HIPPEL, Professor of public and international affairs
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1998 The Austin American-Statesman
December 15, 1998HEADLINE: Judge scolds Microsoft lawyer for court tactic,; Warning comes during
BYLINE: By Mary Beth ReganAmerican-Statesman Washington Staff
WASHINGTON -- A Microsoft attorney pressed a computer expert Monday to admit that Windows 98 is a single, integrated product, but U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson scolded the lawyer for trying to bait the witness into making a careless error.
The exchange took place during the cross-examination of Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor.
Felten repeatedly told the court that Microsoft had combined different computer functions into four Windows files, making it impossible to completely delete its Internet Explorer browser software.
But in a 30-minute video, Felten showed the court how he was able to write a 600-word program that "disenabled" Internet Explorer without adversely affecting the Windows operating system. The program made it possible to install Netscape Communications Corp.'s competing browser without having Internet Explorer occasionally appear.
Microsoft attorney David Heiner insisted repeatedly that Felten address the issue of whether it was possible to completely remove all computer code related to the Internet Explorer browser functions. …
"It seems you are trying to get the witness to commit some slip of the lip, and I think that is an inappropriate cross-examination," the judge said.
The New York Times
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
December 15, 1998HEADLINE: Microsoft Accused of Sabotaging Witness's Computer Program
BYLINE: By JOEL BRINKLEY
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Dec. 14A Princeton University computer-science expert today accused the Microsoft Corporation in Federal court of sabotaging a computer program he had written to demonstrate a key point in the Government's antitrust suit against the software giant.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who is trying the case in District Court here, became visibly angry at the idea that Microsoft might have taken advantage of information it acquired through the court to sabotage the Government's case.
At the Justice Department's request, the expert witness, Edward W. Felten, devised a small program last spring that was able to extricate Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browsing software from its Windows 98 operating system -- something Microsoft had said was impossible.
The question is central to the case. The Government contends that Microsoft illegally tied Internet Explorer to its industry-standard Windows operating system to stifle competition in the market for Web browsers, used to navigate the World Wide Web. …
The Recorder
Copyright 1998 American Lawyer Media, L.P.
December 15, 1998, ThursdayHEADLINE: DOJ: BROWSER CAN BE REMOVED FROM WINDOWS
BYLINE: Karen Donovan
DATELINE: WASHINGTONPrinceton University computer science professor Edward Felten is 35 years old, and from the witness stand he looks a lot younger than that.
But Felten's lack of experience suits the Department of Justice's purposes just fine, judging from comments made from the courthouse steps by David Boies, the government's lead lawyer in _U.S. v. Microsoft_, 98-1231.
Monday morning, the Justice Department's Philip Malone played a videotape demonstration prepared by Felten, purporting to show how he achieved what the $11.3-billion annual revenue computer giant has claimed an impossible task: Removing Internet Explorer from Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Since last October, when the government began to accuse Microsoft of illegal conduct in its pursuit of the so-called I-Web browser wars with Netscape Communications Inc., Microsoft has insisted that Internet Explorer cannot be removed from Windows without breaking the system.
The professor testified that he has been using his method -- which he calls his "Prototype Removal System" and which is known at the Justice Department as "Felten's Fix" -- for more than seven months without difficulty.
Boies, addressing reporters at the lunchtime recess, called the professor's testimony "devastating" to Microsoft's defense. …
The Seattle Times
Copyright 1998 The Seattle Times Company
December 15, 1998HEADLINE: MICROSOFT TRIAL -- DAY 30
A summary of yesterday's events in the case of the United States vs. Microsoft:
Players: Edward Felten, assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University; Microsoft attorney David Heiner; U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
Summary: Felten testified that Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser could be removed from the Windows 95 and Windows 98. He played a videotape showing how he had separated the Web browser from the operating systems.He also testified that the browser did not have to be built into the operating system.
Surprise: Microsoft attorneys, who had not finished their cross-examination of any witness in less than two days, wrapped up questioning of Felten by mid-afternoon.
What's next: The U.S. Department of Justice and 19 states plan to play the videotaped deposition of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and other industry executives, including officials of computer makers Hewlett-Packard and Gateway. Tape playing should last through Thursday when the trial temporarily stops for two weeks for Christmas and New Year's Day.
TechWeb News
Copyright 1998 CMP Media, Inc.
December 15, 1998HEADLINE: Microsoft Backs Off From DOJ Witness
BYLINE: Darryl K. Taft, 1Microsoft quickly dispensed with the government's latest witness, a computer-science professor who testified there was no feasible technical reason for the software giant to integrate its Internet Explorer browser into its Windows operating system.
Microsoft attorney David Heiner took less than a full day in court to complete his cross-examination of Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University who demonstrated IE's Web-browsing functionality could be disengaged from Windows 95 and 98 without affecting the work of the OSes.
Microsoft has taken as many as five days to complete cross-examination of other government witnesses, and has even had to be admonished by the judge hearing the case to wrap up.
However, Felten proved a capable witness, battling Heiner at every turn and not giving any ground on his analysis of the Web-browsing functionality in Win 95 and 98. …
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Information Bank Abstracts
December 15, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: WITNESS SAYS HE UNTIED BROWSER FROM MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM
BYLINE: BY KEITH PERINEABSTRACT:
Princeton University computer expert Edward W Felten, testifying in the Microsoft antitrust trial, says he removed Internet software from Windows 98 while leaving the operating system intact, a feat Microsoft claimed was impossible; says there is no technologically compelling reason to tie the two products together (M)
The Washington Times
Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
December 15, 1998, TuesdayINSIDE POLITICS
BYLINE: Mary Ann Akers; THE WASHINGTON TIMESLOSER OF THE WEEK
Weekly Standard writer Tucker Carlson has dubbed Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz "loser of the week" for his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week. The New York Times described his testimony as "gratuitously patronizing."
"Why would Wilentz risk his reputation to join the already bulging ranks of Clinton throne-sniffers?" Mr. Carlson asked Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, who guesses that "the pressure of time and the passions of the moment" got to Mr. Wilentz.
"As for why anyone would cite the Framers in defense of Clinton, Genovese seems baffled," Mr. Carlson wrote. …
MORE WILENTZ
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz was invited last night to attend an impeachment protest rally at New York University Law School. Other invited guests included: Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison; Sen. Robert G. Torricelli, New Jersey Democrat; author Mary Gordon; Arthur Schlesinger and other NYU professors.
The Washington Post
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
December 15, 1998, TuesdayHEADLINE: Witness Says Browser Can Be Safely Deleted
BYLINE: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post Staff WriterA Princeton University computer scientist argued yesterday in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial that he had pulled off a technological feat the world's largest software company has deemed impossible: Removing Internet browsing software from Windows 98 without crippling the widely used operating system for personal computers.
Prof. Edward W. Felten played a half-hour videotape that he had prepared with government help to illustrate to the presiding judge how a prototype computer program that he had developed removes Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser from Windows 98 without, he maintained, affecting the stability of the operating system.
After the videotape was played, the trial turned highly technical: A Microsoft lawyer set about trying to discredit Felten's testimony by arguing that the professor had not removed the four primary program files that make up Internet Explorer, just a tiny "stub" file that activates those four files.
Microsoft contends those four files are far more critical to Internet Explorer than the deleted file. In fact, if those four files are removed, Microsoft has said that Windows 98 cannot even start.
The separation issue is central to the government's antitrust case against the software giant. …
Felten, who was called to the witness stand by the government, conceded that his prototype program did not remove the four files. But he argued that Microsoft has designed Windows 98 in such a way that the files handle many crucial functions other than Internet browsing. As a result, he said, it made sense only to delete the stub file and modify a few other files. …
Felten argued that Microsoft's decision to combine instructions for Internet browsing alongside instructions for other system tasks in the four files was simply "a packaging decision." …
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 1998 Chicago Tribune Company
December 15, 1998 TuesdayHEADLINE: WITNESS CHALLENGES BROWSER PACKAGING;
MICROSOFT CAN'T JUSTIFY THE WAY IT BUNDLED SOFTWARE, EXPERT SAYSBYLINE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTONA computer scientist testified Monday that there is no justification for the way Microsoft Corp. bundled its Internet software within its dominant Windows operating system.
Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, told the judge at the Microsoft antitrust trial that the company deliberately blended different computer functions into some of the same Windows files.
That essentially makes it impossible to delete all traces of the company's Internet software without affecting the underlying operating system.
But Felten, who studied the closely guarded technical blueprints for Windows in a court-ordered examination, showed a 30-minute video describing how he was able to modify some files to prevent Microsoft's Internet software from starting up.
"I know of no reason Microsoft was technologically compelled to design things that way," he said. "These files are packages of stuff, and some of the stuff relates to Web browsing and some of it doesn't." …