Princeton in the News
November 12 to 18, 1999
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Highlights
HEADLINE: Scored for Life
BYLINE: Paul Starr
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American
Meritocracy
by Nicholas Lemann
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 406 pp., $27)
Paul Starr is professor of sociology at Princeton University and co-editor of The American Prospect.
It has been an enormous change, more profound than the mere circulation of elites that often follows political revolutions. Since 1945, elite institutions in the United States that were once almost entirely the preserve of white high-church Protestant men have opened their doors -- first to Jews and Catholics in the early postwar years and then, in a second opening, to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, and to women, in the 1960s and 1970s. During the same period, higher education has also become far more important as a way to the top of American society, and even to the middle class. Scarcely anyone doubts, at least in public, that these changes have been for the better. They have made America a more just society and contributed to the nation's prosperity, power, and cultural vitality.
But is this transformation incomplete because the criteria for admissions and advancement are imperfect or biased or corrupt? Or, worse yet, is it a fraud? Has one elite favored by birth merely given way to another, supposedly based on merit, but no more deserving and just as self-interested? …
The opening up of the universities to blacks and Hispanics also brought out a previously hidden tension. The first postwar opening of the elite institutions to the children and the grandchildren of European immigrants coincided with the introduction of standardized educational testing. Although selective colleges continued to pay attention to other characteristics of students, performance on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) began to count heavily in admissions. At that time, testing worked in favor of the new groups, as it did later for Asians; but blacks and Hispanics didn't do as well. For blacks and Hispanics, therefore, the tests amounted to an obstacle to admission, and accordingly the tests came under fire for alleged bias. …
Nicholas Lemann's book tells how this system came about. The book is a high achievement. It provides a rich account of the people and the institutions involved in the rise of educational testing and the turn toward meritocracy in major universities, as well as the later struggle over affirmative action. One value of historical inquiry is that it can lay bare long-forgotten choices that created the seemingly settled world that we have today. …
Lemann has clearly put years of research into his book, no less than would be expected of a full-scale academic study, though his book is more entertaining. And while he is highly critical of testing, he has enjoyed the cooperation of key institutions, notably the Educational Testing Service (ETS) , the maker of the SAT. Like any good historian, he has trolled their archives for pertinent and lively material; but he has also interviewed many of the people who figure prominently, or even only incidentally, in the events that he is relating. The Big Test is a pleasure to read not least owing to Lemann's ability to tell the life stories of these people so well while developing his larger narrative. But the book is a narrative rather than an analysis, and so it leaves some important questions unanswered. In the last section of the book, when he turns to the battle over affirmative action in California, Lemann gets too caught up in side stories, and he fails to bring the narrative threads to a satisfying conclusion. Still, this is a major work of contemporary history that ought to be read by anyone interested in understanding the development of American society during the past half-century. …
HEADLINE: For Voters, the 60's Never Died
BYLINE: By Sean Wilentz; New York Times Service
DATELINE: PRINCETON, New Jersey
Liberalism is back - maybe not in name, but in spirit and in substance. Its return has been forecast several times in the 1990s, but now it is clearly in flower. From voter surveys to the floors of Congress, we see abundant evidence that Americans are embracing sensible activist government. This swing of the pendulum represents more than a correction of conservative excesses.
Polls by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press and The New York Times/CBS News were the latest to reveal that voters have rejected the anti- government politicking of recent years. Everything that the respondents identified as a main issue of the day, and most of the secondary issues as well, breaks in favor of liberals and against conservatives.
The Pew poll showed that Americans are markedly less cynical about government than they have been in many years.
The Times/CBS survey showed that the voters rate health care (13 percent) and protection of Social Security (8 percent) as their chief concerns, while only 2 percent cited defense. (Although concern over the health care system was also high early in the decade - especially in 1992, before the Clinton administration's botched reform plan - it was not viewed as being as important as, say, the economy or the budget deficit.) …
The easy explanation for the change is that flush times produce more liberal outlooks. But that economic determinist reading is superficial. We are witnessing a revival of a liberal tradition that had been given up for dead but has assumed a new and disciplined form. …
The writer is a professor of history and director of the program in American studies at Princeton University. This opinion piece also appeared in the International Herald Tribune.
AP Worldstream
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
November 18, 1999; Thursday
HEADLINE: Agents accuse disarmament specialist of spying
DATELINE: MOSCOW
Security officials have arrested a Russian arms-control specialist on suspicion of spying, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday, citing sources in the Federal Security Service.
A spokesman for the agency, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, told Interfax that Igor Sutyagin, who headed a department on military studies at the Institute of USA and Canada in Moscow, has been accused of treason.
Agents arrested him on Oct. 27 in his home in Obninsk, a small town south of Moscow, and have held him since. He was charged with treason on Nov. 5, Interfax reported. …
On the same day Sutyagin was arrested, officers from the securiy agency searched the apartment of Josh Handler, an American Ph.D. student from Princeton University who had also worked at the Institute of USA and Canada.
Handler was in Russia working on a thesis about nuclear disarmament in the 1990', and has said he sometimes shared an office with Sutyagin at the institute.
The two had shared information but no secrets, Handler said in an interview with the Associated Press in October. He has since left Russia, according to colleagues at the institute. …
HEADLINE: Why Minority Recruiting Is Alive and Well in
Texas
BYLINE: JEFFREY SELINGO
Carrying large boxes full of brochures and posters, Norris G. Williams weaves among students in the crowded corridors of Lyndon B. Johnson High School here. It's October, and a large wall calendar hanging in the guidance office indicates Mr. Williams will be one of a few-dozen college recruiters scheduled to pass through here before the new year.
As Mr. Williams makes his way to a meeting with students, a teacher passes him in the hall."The University of Oklahoma, right?" she asks. "You got it," he says, flashing a big smile.
Mr. Williams is indeed well-known among high-school counselors and college recruiters in these parts. It's not because of his sharp suits or polished personality. Most don't even know him by name. They remember Mr. Williams because he's from the University of Oklahoma -- considered by many here to be one of the top out-of-state "raiders" of Texas minority students.
In the wake of the 1996 Hopwood v. Texas decision that banned the use of affirmative action by Texas institutions, dozens of mostly Midwestern colleges have stepped up their efforts to recruit black and Hispanic students here and elsewhere across the state. In the last two years, for instance, the number of out-of-state institutions requesting a schedule of college fairs in Texas has risen nearly 60 per cent. …
In January, Mr. Williams intends to return to Texas to visit specific students and work on parents at receptions in Dallas and Houston. Many other representatives from out-of-state colleges will do the same. Students here eagerly swap information about which college recruiters offer the best freebies, a raffle for airplane tickets to campus (Princeton University), a fajita dinner (Tulane), or an accordion folder for application papers (Boston University).
But getting minority students in Texas to actually apply to out-of-state colleges isn't easy. …
HEADLINE: Russian academic charged with high treason
SOURCE: Interfax news agency, Moscow, in Russian 1402 gmt 18 Nov
99
Text of report by Russian news agency Interfax Kaluga, 18th November: Russia's Federal Security Service has charged the head of the military-technical cooperation section of the United States and Canada Institute, Igor Sutyagin, with high treason.
Kaluga Region Federal Security Service directorate told Interfax today that Sutyagin was arrested on 27th October on suspicion of committing a crime under Article 275 (high treason) of the Russian Criminal Code. The investigation branch of the Federal Security Service directorate charged the academic on 5th November. …
At the same time, according to a report from a famous ecologist, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Aleksey Yablokov, on the night of 27th-28th October (after Sutyagin's arrest), Federal Security Service staff searched the Moscow flat of the American scientist Joshua Handler, an academic from Princeton University (USA) who spent a sabbatical at the United States and Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
According to the ecologist, during the search at Handler' s, who is the author of dozens of works on radiation and nuclear security, the Federal Security Service staff confiscated research material, manuscripts, notebooks and a computer. …
HEADLINE: US FTC Thomas B. Leary sworn in as Federal Trade Commissioner
Thomas B. Leary has been sworn in today as a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission and has assumed the responsibilities of the office.
The FTC enforces federal laws and rules prohibiting unfair or deceptive trade practices or methods of competition.
It was created in 1914 and has five Commissioners.
Mr. Leary has been a partner in Hogan & Hartson, a law firm based in Washington, D.C., since 1983. …
Mr. Leary has published a number of articles on antitrust law, attorney-client privilege, and corporate compliance programs. He received an undergraduate degree in economics from Princeton University and a law degree from Harvard Law School where he was an editor and an officer of the Harvard Law Review. Mr. Leary resides in Washington, D.C. …
HEADLINE: Bishops Vote for Stricter Ties With U.S. Catholic
Colleges
BYLINE: By GUSTAV NIEBUHR
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov. 17
The nation's Roman Catholic bishops voted overwhelmingly today to require theology professors at Catholic colleges and universities to obtain a certification from their bishop declaring that what they teach is "authentic Catholic doctrine."
The requirement, that theologians obtain a "mandatum," or mandate, emerged at the meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as the most controversial element in a broad statement about what the relations should be between the church and America's more than 230 Catholic institutions of higher education. The document, which has been under discussion for nearly a decade and has undergone two major revisions, states that Catholic colleges and universities are fully autonomous and enjoy academic freedom but that their presidents should be Catholics, and, ideally, so should a majority of the trustees.
In many ways, the bishops are going into uncharted territory. The church has no direct control over most Catholic universities, though the institutions regard themselves as part of the church and are not likely to want to cross it. This raises the possibility that a bishop could challenge a theologian and at least provoke a fight that neither the church nor the university would want. …
In the discussion that preceded the 233-to-31 vote approving the document, some bishops pointed to the long-ago secularization of Harvard, Yale and Princeton universities, all founded by Protestants, as examples of the trend that Catholic leaders want to avoid. …
HEADLINE: INK / A LIBERAL DOSE OF BROADER AIMS / AMERICAN PROSPECT IS A GOOD CANDIDATE / TO WIDEN AUDIENCE
BYLINE: Paul D. Colford. Paul Colford's e-mail address is paul.colford @newsday. com.
JUDGING from all the media attention that Warren Beatty has generated with his maybe-I-will run for president, you might think that the actor was the last unmistakable liberal standing. But The American Prospect, which quietly has built a circulation of 27,000 in 10 years of publication, is making its own run for a wider audience by trumpeting liberal views.
"We reached a point where we were doing fine as a semipopular, semiacademic magazine for connoisseurs," Robert Kuttner, co- editor and founder, said in an interview last week from the publication's Boston offices. "But we felt that, with a little repositioning and some punchier material, leavening the magazine somewhat, we could get a bigger audience to look at it." So in the Nov. 23 election issue, besides political writer Ronald Brownstein's look at how Al Gore and Bill Bradley "are going left," there is critic Jane Rosenzweig's hip take on how TV women are acting more like girls and TV girls are "more interesting than their adult counterparts." …
Yes, it takes lots of money to dress up the magazine-whose redesign-cum- color now makes it the best-looking of the opinion journals-and to dramatically increase its frequency from bimonthly to biweekly. The nonprofit American Prospect has received an initial grant of $5.5 million from the Florence and John Schumann Foundation. The magazine plans an aggressive direct-mail campaign in a bid to grow its circulation to 100,000 over the next five years and thereby aim for financial self-sufficiency.
Kuttner, also known for his column in the Boston Globe, shares the editing duties with co-editor Paul Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. Robert B. Reich, the former secretary of labor, is national editor.
All three men founded the liberal magazine and write for it, too. …
HEADLINE: In a case of strange bedfellows, Buchanan and Fulani
are the oddest coupling
BYLINE: By Dick Polman
WASHINGTON _ What's it called when a gay-baiting, '60s-bashing, anti-abortion conservative, a guy who once referred to blacks as "zulus," forges an alliance with a radical black female Marxist who supports gay rights and abortion?
Call it a textbook case of strange bedfellows, certainly the oddest political coupling of the 2000 presidential campaign.
And yet it's perfectly logical, in a Machiavellian sort of way.
Pat Buchanan, Republican dropout, is gunning for the Reform party nomination, and the $12 million in federal matching money that comes with it; to succeed, he needs new friends. Lenora Fulani, former presidential candidate for a fringe left- wing party that's now defunct, is looking to become a player in the Reform camp; to succeed, she needs new friends.
He's got the celebrity cache and national name ID that she needs. She's got the nuts-and-bolts expertise that he needs. …
But odd couplings are an American tradition; while seeking the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, conservative Ronald Reagan announced in advance his running mate, moderate Pennyslvania Sen. Richard Schweiker. They tabled their profound disagreements in a mutual (albeit unsuccessful) bid for power _ and that helps to explain Buchanan and Fulani.
"When you've got a common goal, you can always find ways to stomach the disagreements," said Sean Wilentz, a political analyst and historian at Princeton University. "Each uses the other, and in that sense, it's a little like the Hitler- Stalin pact of 1939." …
HEADLINE: Russian Arms Researcher Charged With Spying for
U.S.
BYLINE: David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: MOSCOW, Nov. 17
Russian security services have charged an arms control researcher with spying for the United States, sources said today.
Igor Sutyagin, chief of the section on military technological research at the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, was detained Oct. 27 by the Federal Security Service in Kaluga, south of Moscow, where he lives.
At the time, sources said the investigation was looking into leaks of classified information. But on Nov. 5, Sutyagin was formally accused of espionage, the sources said. Details of the charges are not known.
Paul Podvig, editor of a book on Russia's nuclear forces to which Sutyagin contributed a chapter, said, "I am 100 percent certain that Igor didn't do anything wrong." …
Joshua Handler, a Princeton University PhD student who was a guest at the USA-Canada Institute, was questioned in the case, but no accusations have been made against him. He recently left Russia.
HEADLINE: Cal State Hayward program helps produce qualified
biotech workers
BYLINE: By Bryce G. Hoffman
HAYWARD, Calif. -- Cerus Corp. is a Concord biotechnology firm that is working on a way to purify human blood. It is an important effort that the medical community is watching with interest. So far, it looks promising.
But, as with most biotechnology projects, a large team of highly skilled scientists and technicians is required to do the work. Finding that team can pose as great a challenge as the research itself.
"Skilled labor in this field is hard to get," said Stephen Isaacs, Cerus' president and chief executive.
Rising to meet this growing demand is Cal State Hayward. More than a decade ago, the university's biology and chemistry departments joined forces to create a special biotechnology certificate program designed to meet the needs of this important local industry. So far, about 125 students have successfully completed the program, and it is drawing praise from students and employers alike.
In 1984, the biotechnology industry was at the peak of its first boom and professor Steve Benson _ now chair of Hayward's Biological Sciences Department _ was busy fielding a barrage of telephone calls from companies desperately seeking technicians to help create the next wonder drug.
. While there was no shortage of doctorate degree holders or entry-level technicians, Benson said Bay Area biotechnology firms were struggling to find people to fill the places in between _ the advanced technicians and research assistants that occupy the middle space between lab workers and scientists in the research hierarchy.
Benson and his colleague, professor Larry Scheve, responded by creating a year-long, post-baccalaureate certificate program designed to train these mid-level biotechnology workers. …
Student Vanessa Hanley said she is impressed with the level of instruction at Hayward, as well as by the caliber of the faculty. That is high praise coming from a recent graduate of Princeton University.
Hanley went to work for a biotechnology firm in San Diego after earning a bachelor's in biology from that Ivy League institution. She liked the work, but wanted a better job. Hanley said that with a biotechnology certificate from Cal State Hayward, she will have little difficulty finding one in this job market. …
HEADLINE: HOW WILL THEY BE MADE IN THE FUTURE?; 'PEOPLE ARE BEING ASKED, IN EFFECT, WHICH DISEASES ARE SERIOUS ENOUGH TO WARRANT THE DESTRUCTION OF A HUMAN EMBRYO'
BYLINE: Paul Barker
BIO-ETHICS WAS, not long ago, one of those hyphenated neologisms that are of interest only to specialists. The word itself may still trip off few people's tongues. But its subject matter - the ethics of biological and medical research - is now embedded firmly in everyday conversation and, even more so, newspaper headlines. On the one hand, Dolly the cloned sheep; on the other hand, the sperm from a dead father posthumously fertilising his widow's eggs.
It is perhaps the first branch of philosophy to grow to full strength in the age of the opinion poll. Now the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has decided to put its latest consultation document on to the Internet, as well as publishing it in print, in order to check what the public thinks about what is called "pre -implantation genetic diagnosis". People are being asked, in effect, to help decide which diseases are serious enough to warrant the destruction of a human embryo. (The websites are www.hfea.gov.uk and www.open.gov. uk/doh/genetics) …
Peter Singer is the philosopher whose book, Animal Liberation (first published in 1975), launched that particular bio-ethical movement in its present form. The book has sold half a million copies. He has just moved to America, having been appointed by Princeton University as its first professor of bio-ethics. He is based in the university's Centre for Human Values and Philosophy.
He is one of those men who write fiercely but speak gently, as I found when I talked to him at Princeton soon after he took up his new post. These days he is preoccupied with "life and death decisions". He considers the power of science, especially in matters of genetics, "rather scary". But he has found himself caught in the crossfire of debate in the United States because of his tolerant stance on euthanasia (and those who believe that even an embryo has life would say that even pre-implantation screening means a kind of early-day euthanasia). A nine-page article about Singer in The New Yorker this autumn was headed "The Dangerous Philosopher."
He is, he says, "less troubled by killing than by suffering". …
HEADLINE: MUSIC REVIEW: Bringing Two Different Worlds
Together
BYLINE: By BERNARD HOLLAND
Jonathan Harvey has led a relatively quiet life in modern British music, but his reach has been considerable. Mr. Harvey was raised in the choir school tradition of his country. He acquired a certain intellectual rigor in his studies at Princeton University and a grasp of electronics and its brave, new and seemingly limitless world at the Ircam studios in Paris. Traditional instruments in combination interest him, also the world of computers. But perhaps most interesting in his music is a coming together of the two.
So-called acoustical instruments and electronic sound have not worked easily together: like cousins, perhaps, but distant ones. Mr. Harvey's evening at the Miller Theater on Monday night, a retrospective put on jointly by Ensemble 21 and Ircam, was most engaging in its efforts at reconciliation. So fundamentally different as these two worlds have seemed to us, it was heartening to find one acting as a natural extension of the other. …
HEADLINE: From drugs to stress, many factors can disturb one's
state of mind
SOURCE: STAFF WRITER
BYLINE: Scott LaFee
Perched atop the spinal column, ensconced within a bone-hard skull and protected by a sophisticated blood-screening system, the human brain would seem relatively safe and separate from most of what ails the body.
It is not.
By its very nature and function, your brain is an extraordinarily vulnerable organ, highly sensitive to its surroundings, regularly afflicted by a host of perils and predations.
"The brain is very resilient," said Stephen Heinemann, a neurobiologist at The Salk Institute in La Jolla. "But every injury, every abuse, indeed every experience in life, affects the brain in some way, often physically and permanently."
Some things, of course, are obviously bad for the brain. A sharp, powerful blow to the head, for example, can result in a concussion -- the sudden, violent sloshing of the brain within the skull. Think of Jell-O vigorously shaken in a covered bowl. The result can be disastrous. The brain is physically jolted. Nerve tissues, blood vessels and meninges (the three protective membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord) shear, tear and rupture. Damaged neurons may malfunction or die. Internal bleeding can occur, resulting in temporary oxygen deprivation to portions of the brain or deadly swelling.
The damaging effects of stress may go further. In recent years, neuroscientists have discovered that, contrary to earlier medical dogma, human brains produce new nerve cells in adulthood. The finding is notable because it suggests the brain may possess innate healing abilities that could be exploited in new treatments for a variety of degenerative neurological conditions.
But a recent Princeton University study examining adult tree shrews, whose brains are more similar to humans than to rodents, found that stressful experiences appear to dampen, even stop, this proliferation of new adult nerve cells.
"We have known for many years that stress can interfere with neuron production in the fetal brain and that it can damage and even kill pre- existing neurons," said Robert Sapolsky, a stress expert and biologist at Stanford University. "But this is the first demonstration that when there is neuron production in the adult brain, stress can disrupt it." …
HEADLINE: Of mice and men--genes and their link to behavior
BYLINE: Makoto Mitsui Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer ; Yomiuri
In September, a team of researchers from Princeton University revealed the highly intelligent Doogie mouse--a transgenic mouse in which the activity of specific genes was strengthened. Doogie mice demonstrated a talent for memorizing the shapes of objects and an outstanding ability to learn their way out of a maze.
When a Doogie was put in a pool of opaque water and repeatedly made to find the position of a stand, it learned to find the stand in times 10 to 30 percent faster than those recorded by ordinary mice.
In memory tests, Doogie mice showed little interest in things they had already seen, or else completely ignored them.
With the development of genetic engineering, it has become possible to tailor-make mice with various characteristics and behavior patterns, such as mice with a higher level of intelligence, mice that are poor at caring for their young and mice that are particularly sensitive to alcohol.
Mice are used for genetic experiments because their life and reproductive cycles are short, and experiments can be conducted effectively. Experiments on mice have contributed to clarifying the relationship between behavior and genes.
Doogie mice are expected to prove useful in understanding the way memories are formed. It is already known that changes happen within neuron cells so that information can be conveyed easily. The Princeton University research team manipulated a gene to increase the amount of protein that surrounds these cells and conveys information. This improved the memory of the Doogie mice.
The research team believes that it may also be possible to improve memory and intellect in humans by manipulating genes. It is also studying the possibility of employing the technique to treat sufferers of Alzheimer's disease and disorders of the nervous system. …
HEADLINE: Use of different time scale puts new spin on
universe's future
BYLINE: By Tom Siegfried
HERSHEY, Pa. -- Even without a clock, the universe can still tell time.
After all, the universe had been around 13 billion years or so before people invented sundials. Even before the Earth kept track of the years by traveling around the sun, the universe clicked along on its own time scale, recorded by the cosmic clock of how fast space expands.
There's nothing special about measuring that expansion in terms of seconds, minutes or hours. Each tick of the cosmic clock could instead be marked by the universe's doubling in size.
Measuring time in that way gives the life of the universe a very different kind of biography. Most of the chapters would cover the first fraction of a second, when the universe might have doubled in size a million times or more, says physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. Since then, it has doubled maybe only something like 100 times.
This approach to cosmic timekeeping is part of a bigger story about the nature of the universe -- a story that has undergone radical revision in the last two decades of the millennium.
In the old story, Steinhardt told science writers at a symposium in Hershey last week, the universe contained only radiation and matter (some of it invisible, or "dark"). In the new story, the universe is also full of a mysterious form of "dark energy." …
HEADLINE: Tapping Into the Vibrations of the Cosmos
BYLINE: By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
DATELINE: LIVINGSTON, La., Nov. 12
Sprawling across snake-infested Louisiana woodlands, a gigantic gravity wave detector that builders hope will open a new window on the universe was inaugurated today.
On hand for the ceremony were Dr. Rita R. Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation, and many leading theorists in astrophysics, relativity theory and related sciences.
The L-shaped detector here and its recently completed twin in Hanford, Wash., are called LIGO (pronounced LIE-go), for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Having cost $296 million so far, it is the largest enterprise ever financed by the National Science Foundation -- and one of the riskiest.
From the 1970's, when it was first proposed, LIGO has met with the skepticism of many astronomers and assaults by would-be budget cutters in Congress and elsewhere. The signals of gravity waves reaching Earth from the merger of black holes and other cosmic catastrophes are expected to be so faint that LIGO may detect nothing at all, at least in its first version.
But the possibility of deciphering gravitational radiation as a means of penetrating secrets of the birth of the universe and the evolution of black holes, galaxies and other mysteries carried the day, and LIGO was completed, with enough money to pay for its operation through 2002.
LIGO thus became the first large detector in what scientists hope will be an international network of similar instruments on the ground and eventually in space. Within two years, the Virgo gravity detector, about the same size as LIGO, will be completed by an Italian-French collaboration near Pisa, Italy, and smaller detectors are being built in Japan and Germany.
If both LIGO and Virgo work as hoped, they can operate in concert, viewing the Northern Hemisphere sky from three separate points. This would allow scientists to calculate the direction from which a gravitational signal reached Earth, and to determine whether the wave coincided with some other kind of signal -- a gamma-ray pulse, a flash of light or some other kind of radiation.
One such signal might come from a pulse of neutrinos coinciding with a gravity wave, said Dr. John Bahcall, a leading astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. In his talk, Dr. Bahcall described gravity waves, like neutrinos, as "new messengers for astronomy," capable of probing vast and hitherto unfathomed parts of the universe. …
The existence of gravity waves remained hypothetical until 1974, when two Princeton University physicists, Dr. Joseph H. Taylor and his student Dr. Russel A. Hulse detected them indirectly.
Using the huge radio telescope at Arecibo, P.R., the two scientists discovered two pulsating neutron stars in orbit around one another. After making a series of very precise measurements of radio pulses from the two stars, the physicists found that their orbital spin rate was speeding up, showing that they were losing orbital energy. The rate of this loss turned out to be just what would be expected of very massive stars shedding orbital energy in the form of gravity waves.
For their discovery, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Hulse were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics. …
HEADLINE: DATABOOK; RELIGION; Seek and Ye Shall Find; The
reawakening of spirituality shows no sign of stopping
BYLINE: Sylvia Rubin, Chronicle Staff Writer
BODY: San Francisco: spiritual capital of the world. Episcopal Bishop William E. Swing: believer in miracles.
Swing is a member of a new Bay Area interdenominational group of spiritual leaders determined to change the world through religious tolerance. Twenty years from now, Swing hopes to be doing some of his deep thinking at a San Francisco institution that would, in spiritual terms, parallel the United Nations. San Francisco lost out on being home to the original United Nations, so he figures it's our turn this time around.
They are calling it United Religions, a physical place for world religious leaders to have a safe forum for compromise, negotiation and diplomacy.
"There will never be peace among nations without peace among religions," Swing says. "Today there is no arena to engage in conversation for peace among religions."
While he's working on that, there is a spirituality boom going on across the nation. It's still somewhat self-centered, however. "The human being is at the center, and everything is defined in terms of the human being and not the Great Spirit," Swing says. …
So far, anyway, the spiritual awakening in America is a mix-and-match proposition, adding up to a renewed interest in meditation, prayer, Scripture study and worship, says Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow, author of "After Heaven: Spirituality in America." Wuthnow, who has spoken widely on the subject, says people are fasting, reclaiming religious dietary laws, listening to spiritual music, observing the Sabbath and rediscovering the arts. …
HEADLINE: Princeton grad aspires to fulfill childhood
dream to be astronaut
BYLINE: By Michael Grabell, The Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Jason Rhodes GS '99 has always reached for the stars.
Flying among them may soon become a reality for the physicist, who received his doctorate from Princeton University last summer.
Rhodes was among 120 candidates interviewed last month at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston after having been selected from an original pool of 3,000. Rhodes said he must now wait until March to find out if he is among the 20 selected to become astronauts.
"I think I have a good shot as long as I passed all the medical tests," Rhodes said. "During a week-long evaluation there are plenty of chances for someone to fail a test despite being in top physical condition."
Rhodes said he underwent a series of medical tests and interviews during the review process to assure that he is able to survive the physical and mental stress of being in space. …
HEADLINE: Princeton takes Y2K precautions
BYLINE: By Jonathan Goldberg, The Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Princeton University has prepared its most important computers to avoid Y2K problems, but it anticipates that small problems will occur when the year 2000 begins, University Treasurer Raymond Clark said yesterday afternoon at a U-Council meeting in Dodds Auditorium.
Many computers, software programs and electronic devices are unable to distinguish between years ending in "00," such as 1800, 1900 and 2000. As a result, when the year 2000 begins, those computers might malfunction.
The University has replaced its mainframe and mainframe operating system with Y2K-compliant technology, Clark explained. A company hired by the University reprogrammed other essential computers used by the administration. CIT and the company have also eliminated the 18 problems identified by the company in a risk assessment. …
HEADLINE: Business news from around New Jersey
EWING, N.J. (AP) - Universal Display Corp., a developer of flat panel display technology, announced Monday that it received a two-year, $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation in support of its Stacked Organic Light Emitting Device Technology.
The technology is aimed at improving resolution in televisions and other electronic displays by stacking the red-green and blue pixels on top of each other, rather than placing them side by side.
Universal Display has been developing organic light emitting device technology with Princeton University and the University of Southern California since 1994.
HEADLINE: Universal Display Corporation Receives a $400,000
Phase II Award From the National Science Foundation
DATELINE: EWING, N.J., Nov. 15, 1999
Contract is for Saturated Full Color Organic Light Emitting Devices (OLEDS) for Low-cost, Low-power Displays
Universal Display Corporation (UDC) (NASDAQ: PANL; PHLX: PNL), a developer of flat panel display technology, announced today that it received a 2 year, $400,000 Phase II award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of its high efficiency Stacked Organic Light Emitting Device (SOLED) technology.
UDC teamed with its long-standing research partner, Princeton University, for this proposal under the NSF's Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR). …
UDC's SOLED technology, which is protected by 7 US patents, is a novel approach to high resolution electronic displays. The SOLED architecture vertically stacks the red, green and blue pixels on top of each other rather than the conventional side by side architecture used in televisions and current electronic displays, thus providing three times the resolution in the same area. …
HEADLINE: HOW MOST ECONOMISTS MISSED THE BOAT
BYLINE: By Michael J. Mandel; Economics Editor Mandel follows the
New Economy.
Celebrating victory in economics is dangerous. When the New York Yankees won the 1999 World Series, they could be confident that no statistician could go back and change the final outcomes. But in economics, the data are always subject to revision, and what seems to be true at one time may later turn out to be very different.
So when the Commerce Dept. released a major revision of the historical economic data on Oct. 28, it dramatically changed the score on the three-cornered economic policy wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The big winners are New Economy advocates -- including BUSINESS WEEK -- who now have much better evidence to support their claims that information technology can lead to much higher productivity growth. ECONOMIC SHOCKS. The big losers are most economic forecasters and mainstream macroeconomists, who held the conventional view that growth mainly depends on building up the capital stock of equipment and structures. …
More important for the supply-siders, the sterling economic performance of the 1990s destroys the central attack by conventional economists against tax cuts. They argued that the high budget deficits in the 1980s would give a short-term boost to output, but then the lack of savings would gradually eat away at the future long-run competitiveness of the economy.
In a 1988 book, Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard University economist and critic of supply-side economics, wrote: ''Our prosperity was a false prosperity, built on borrowing from the future.'' Similarly, a 1987 BUSINESS WEEK column by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder argued that ''no binge lasts forever. The drunk eventually sobers up. Sooner or later, America will awaken to the hangover of Reaganomics.''
But these dire consequences of the tax cuts never came to pass. Instead, the economy accelerated in the 1990s. True, federal taxes were raised in 1990 and 1993 to help close the deficit. But even after these two increases, the share of personal income going to federal income taxes in 1995 was still only 9.4%, substantially below the nearly 11% share in 1979. …
HEADLINE: 'THE PILL' BETTER LATE THAN NEVER; MANY UNAWARE OF EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION
BYLINE: Mary Powers The Commercial Appeal
Sometimes the condom broke or slipped. Sometimes women realized too late that they missed two or more birth control pills that month or that the diaphragm slipped or that they didn't get their birth control shots as scheduled. Sometimes at the crucial moment the lack of birth control just didn't seem important, until a few hours later.
Then they panic.
On Mondays Pam Preston of Memphis Planned Parenthood might have five or six such women waiting to see her. Often they are in their 20s, college students. Some tell her the condom broke or slipped off. Others explain they aren't very sexually active and weren't prepared.
For many, Preston, a nurse practitioner, will have good news.
After a brief medical exam, she'll hand them four specially formulated birth control pills - two to take immediately and two to take in 12 hours.
If taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse, those pills are 75 to 86 percent effective at preventing pregnancy. By next year, she's likely to have one or two additional options. …
WHERE THERE'S HELP
More information about emergency contraception is available by calling the following toll-free number or via the Internet. …
-- Princeton University's Office of Population research operates a Web site dedicated to emergency contraception. It is http://opr.Princeton.edu/ec
HEADLINE: Number 13: Amazon.com - Jeff Bezos
BYLINE: David Jastrow
When resellers saw the grin of Amazon.com Inc. chairman Jeff Bezos next to his Labrador retriever, some of them used to cringe in fear.
The Seattle-based online retailer has led an industry evolution that is permanently changing the way VARs conduct business. With 12 million customers and projected 1999 sales of $1.4 billion, Amazon.com and its seemingly benevolent leader have stirred the full gamut of emotions from channel executives.
"As recently as a year ago, I lived in fear of being 'amazoned,' " says Joshua Meltzer, president of Technology Safety Systems Inc. an integrator based in Cherry Hill, N.J. "Now I know that fear was pointless, and we are embracing E-commerce as a new and better channel to reach our end customers." …
As a student at Princeton University, Bezos often philosophized about the future, but no one could guess that he would revolutionize the computer industry, says David Risher, senior vice president of products and services at Amazon.com and a peer of Bezos at Princeton. "There is no way you could have known in 1987 that he would change the entire computer industry." …
HEADLINE: Use of different time scale puts
BYLINE: Tom Siegfried
DATELINE: HERSEY, PA.
HERSHEY, Pa. - Even without a clock, the universe can still tell time.
After all, the universe had been around 13 billion years or so before people invented sundials. Even before the Earth kept track of the years by traveling around the sun, the universe clicked along on its own time scale, recorded by the cosmic clock of how fast space expands.
There's nothing special about measuring that expansion in terms of seconds, minutes or hours. Each tick of the cosmic clock could instead be marked by the universe's doubling in size.
Measuring time in that way gives the life of the universe a very different kind of biography. Most of the chapters would cover the first fraction of a second, when the universe might have doubled in size a million times or more, says physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. Since then, it has doubled maybe only something like 100 times.
This approach to cosmic timekeeping is part of a bigger story about the nature of the universe - a story that has undergone radical revision in the last two decades of the millennium.
In the old story, Dr. Steinhardt told science writers at a symposium in Hershey last week, the universe contained only radiation and matter (some of it invisible, or "dark"). In the new story, the universe is also full of a mysterious form of "dark energy."
In the old story, the universe began with a bang and then expanded at an ever slowing rate, possibly heading for an eventual end to expansion and collapse into a big crunch. In the new story, the initial expansion was briefly much faster, and the future of the universe depends on what that dark energy is made of.
In any case, the new story offers a dramatic departure from the standard understanding of the cosmos.
"In my view, it's as revolutionary as the Copernican revolution," Dr. Steinhardt said at the symposium, sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. …
So the universe might expand forever, becoming really big but also cold and dead - depending on the nature of the dark energy that's causing the accelerated expansion. …
HEADLINE: NBA giants carry ball for Bradley: Hall of Famers aid
fund raising
SOURCE: Registers Wire Service
New York, N.Y. -His former teammates wore white New York Knicks jerseys, but when Bill Bradley returned courtside Sunday at Madison Square Garden, he was wearing a gray flannel politician's uniform -set apart from the basketball legends who joined him at a $1.5 million fund-raiser for his uphill quest to become president.
The former Democratic senator from New Jersey, who for years had shied away from talking up his past as a basketball Hall of Famer, joined his 1970 championship Knicks teammates and two dozen National Basketball Association giants before 7,500 cheering fans and political donors.
The parade of former Bradley teammates such as Willis Reed and Walt Frazier and basketball greats Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving was both calibrated and affectionate. The event managed to hog the airwaves on the Sunday political talk shows, raise cash and boost Bradley's national profile all at the same time. …
Despite his underdog position in the presidential race against Vice President Al Gore, Bradley has built a well-honed fund-raising apparatus. Rick Wright, Bradley's former Princeton University basketball teammate and the senator's campaign director, expects the campaign will easily reach $45 million, the maximum amount that will be matched by federal funds. …
SECTION: OPINION
HEADLINE: Gore puts crackpot intellectualism to work
BYLINE: By Marianne M. Jennings
Sen. Joseph McCarthy once said that he didn't care how many "crackpots" and "screwballs" taught on college campuses; he supported their academic freedom so long as they didn't infiltrate the government. Sen. McCarthy didn't anticipate infiltration by their disciples. Mrs. Clinton used her Yale and Wellesley education to attempt a hijack of health care and hold seances with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. Mr. Clinton is surely the nation's alpha crackpot. …
Princeton University hired Australian philosopher Peter Singer to occupy an endowed chair, believing it had captured the Einstein of ethics. Professor Singer has an interesting sale-on-approval program for parents. If, within the first 30 days after their child is born, the parents decide, due to disabilities, deformities or other imperfections not found generally in models' frozen embryos, that they really don't want the child, they can kill it. The whoopla, including protests from trustee Steve Forbes, has been loud, but Singer's nutso ideas don't stop with baby take-or-kill programs. …
HEADLINE: PODIUM: BILL CLINTON HAS TAKEN DEMOCRACY FORWARD; FROM A LECTURE BY THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ON PROGRESSIVE POLITICS, GIVEN AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
BYLINE: Sidney Blumenthal
ONE WAY to think about the complexity of the Clinton presidency is to think about presidents. In our history, there has been little progress without great progressive presidents. Democracy has not advanced in a vacuum, a fable of natural unfolding, blessed by Providence. Nor has democracy grown as a simple response to popular pressure against the interests, the gloss of the progressive-era historians whose interpretation has transmuted into fragmentary identity politics and deconstructive cultural studies.
From the beginning, progressive politicians have struggled to gain the executive, to infuse it not only with energy but with previously untapped strengths, in order to galvanise the federal government to remake the nation and give it a new sense of itself. Only the president represents the whole nation; only the president can claim to speak for it. …
In each case the pattern has been similar. The rise to the office or its tenure provoked clashes raising the spectre of civil war or, at the least, profound constitutional crisis. The progressive presidents all allied themselves with the cultural and economic outsiders, especially immigrants. Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Jackson were slave-holders, divided figures therefore, but they ardently believed that diversity added to the dynamism of the country. For them, this was not merely a moral statement. It was a political one against those who would repress aliens and dissenters. They set themselves against a conservative temper, those fearful of difference and change, uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, defenders of special privilege, construing the nation in their own narrow image. In reaction to those who have sought to reanimate the federal government through capture of the presidency, conservative opposition has frequently crossed beyond conventional partisanship. …
William Jefferson Clinton is the first president of the post-industrial and post-Cold War era. Progressive presidents recognise they must not reiterate the past, but meet new challenges, requiring a new invention of government. The President is conscious of his project and its analogy to the presidents who introduced the reforms of the industrial era. Like them, he has used the presidency to forward democracy in response to changed circumstances. Like them, entrenched congressional conservatives have often frustrated him. His task has been to redefine the Madisonian synthesis. …
HEADLINE: On a MISSION; As furniture-makers Sue Mack and Kevin Rodel will tell you, renewed interest in the Arts & Crafts style is fueled by philosophy as well as design. They're converts.
BYLINE: AMY SUTHERLAND Staff Writer
DATELINE: POWNAL
The furniture in Kevin Rodel and Sue Mack's kitchen doesn't quite jibe with the unassuming, low-slung room in their rather beat-up 19th-century farmhouse.
A beautiful, quarter-sawn oak table takes up a good chunk of the cramped room. The table's corner pillars with stained glass inlaid at the top rise up like lanterns. At one end of the room, an oak server is ablaze with light. The top, which is covered with blue tiles, glimmers like a garden pool. The back is covered with blue stained glass in a simplified peacock tail design.
This is the couple's de facto showroom. In a workshop 100 feet or so from the house, they make Arts & Crafts-style furniture. …
In reaction to the poor quality of mass-production, he emphasized handwork and high-quality materials. Morris strove to elevate the craftsperson to his former high position and started guilds in the medieval tradition. The movement, which championed straight lines and right angles in design, was also meant to counter the decorative excess of the Victorian era.
The movement spread around Europe and across the Atlantic. It peaked between 1895 to 1920, losing its momentum after World War I. It wasn't until a 1972 exhibit at Princeton University that interest in Arts & Crafts was reborn. Now, there are two major annual conferences and several magazines devoted to the style. …
HEADLINE: Redpoint Closes First Fund at $600M
BYLINE: J. Bradley Spirrison
Two months after departing from established venture firms Brentwood Venture Capital and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), partners at Redpoint Ventures last month closed the firm's inaugural venture fund at $600 million.
The firm raised the fund, which has a 70%/30% carried interest split, exclusively from previous Brentwood and IVP limited partners. Although the firm has made several investments in the Internet, services, and media industries, Reflect.com, an interactive beauty business launched by Procter & Gamble, is the firm's only disclosed portfolio company (PEW Sept. 20, p. 1).
Redpoint was conceived to consolidate its partner's information technology expertise into one investment entity. …
Redpoint limited partners include ARCO, Brinson Partners, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Duke Foundation, Endowment Venture Partners, Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Horsley Bridge Partners, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knightsbridge Advisors, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York, Northwestern University, Princeton University, Rockefeller Foundation, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, St. Paul Venture Capital, Pfizer, TIFF, University of California, Venture Investment Associates, Williams College and Yale University.
HEADLINE: Shultz endorses Bush campaign, lambasts Clinton at
Princeton
BYLINE: By Emma Soichet, The Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
In a visit to Princeton University this weekend, former Secretary of State George Shultz '42 criticized the Clinton Administration's handling of foreign policy issues and endorsed Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election.
In an interview Friday, Shultz extolled former president Ronald Reagan for overcoming the greatest challenge to his administration, the Cold War. Shultz also blasted the current administration's inability to maintain a consistent policy abroad.
"When I started, the Cold War could not have been any colder. By the time I left, it was all over but the shouting," Shultz said, explaining that in 1982, "the idea of free markets was not popular globally, but that by 1989 it had become conventional wisdom." …
"I think Clinton has been an absolutely terrible president," he said after asserting his faith in GOP front-runner George W. Bush's potential to be a good president and lauding the candidate as a person with a "capacity for good judgment." …
Shultz pointed to Clinton's attitude toward foreign intervention in sovereign states as particularly troublesome.
He called the Russians' assault in Chechnya "a more systematic decimation than what the Serbs did in Kosovo," and questioned the Clinton administration's policy of non-intervention in the Russian province despite reports of human rights violations there. …
Throughout this distinguished career, however, a rumor persisted among the Princeton community that Shultz sported a tiger tattoo on a special part of his body.
A former roommate of Shultz's, Norman Cook '42, confirmed the bit of hearsay Friday, reporting that though the tattoo is "not a monstrously huge tattoo. I would call it 'ass-thetic.' "
HEADLINE: Shakur speaks at Princeton about Black
Panthers, slain son Tupac
BYLINE: By Martha Pitts, The Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.
Afeni Shakur, former Black Panther and mother of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, asked students to learn from her life in a Princeton University address last Friday. The speech was part of the Third World Center's "The Color of Success" youth conference.
The conference was geared toward high school youth of color and drew 70 students from New Jersey and New York.
In its selection of the keynote speaker, the TWC Governance Board said it wanted someone who would appeal to young people and empower them with confidence.
Greeted with cheers from the crowd, which included a diverse group of University students, Shakur began by recounting her past experiences as an active member of the Black Panther Party.
"I can share with you what my life is, my mistakes," she said. "I pray that you will be able to grow from my thoughts." …
HEADLINE: States hope scholarships keep top students at home
Residency is essential for tuition help
BYLINE: Mary Beth Marklein
Tenth-grader Chad Gambrell has long planned to enroll at his father's alma mater, the University of Georgia in Athens.
Joe, his dad, thinks his son has the credentials to get in. And he is impressed by Georgia's HOPE scholarships, which cover tuition, fees and books for Georgia students who earn a B average in high school and maintain it in college.
One problem, though. The Gambrells live in North Carolina, so they "probably would not qualify" for the scholarship, says University of Georgia financial aid director Ray Tripp.
Joe Gambrell was one of thousands of callers last week to USA TODAY's College Admission & Financial Aid Hotlines. He understands the rationale: a state trying to keep its top students from heading to college in other states. He just wondered if there was any way his son could benefit, too.
"We can't help it we live in another state," he says. …
Books
-- The Insider's Guide to Paying for College (Peterson's, $14.95). Don Betterton, director of undergraduate financial aid at Princeton University, has advice for parents of young children on starting a savings plan, finding scholarships and grants, and related topics. Available mid-December.
HEADLINE: A Century in the Arts
CLASSICAL MUSIC: Crossover creates a world of potential
BYLINE: Judith Green, Staff
All through its history, classical music has gone through one crisis after another. For an art created to give pleasure and restore the spirit, it has been interrupted time and again by discord.
From organum, the choral style in the Middle Ages, to minimalism in the 1980s, as each form has become the accepted norm, it has found opposition ready and waiting. …
What crossover has done, in the simplest possible terms, is reopen the possibilities of classical music, which less than a hundred years ago was considered moribund and done for. The expressive possibilities of what was once considered peripheral music have been like a transfusion of fresh blood into an anemic patient.
Look at a crossover artist like electric guitarist Steve Mackey, for instance. He started playing as a teenager in a garage band, then studied with mainstream academic composers such as Donald Martino, Andrew Imbrie and John Harbison. He now teaches composition at Princeton University and writes for musicians as varied as guitarist Bill Frisell and the Kronos Quartet.
"It uses elements of rock music," Mackey says of his work. "I like its rhythm and energy, and I like the sound of the electric guitar. . . . My music couldn't be written by someone who wasn't seriously invested in both worlds (classical and rock). I'm not making a conscious effort to mix these things up. I'm just mixed up," he adds cheerfully. …
HEADLINE: IN THE 1930S, JOE LOUIS BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH
BOXING
BYLINE: JOYCE CAROL OATES; Special to The News
On June 22, 1937, in Chicago, Joe Louis knocked out James J. Braddock in the eighth round to gain boxing's heavyweight championship.
So far as "killer instinct" is concerned, Joe Louis was an
anomaly, which no biography of his life has ever quite explained.
If, indeed, one can explain any of our motives, except in the most
sweeping psychological and sociological terms.
Louis was a modest and self-effacing man outside the ring, but, in
the ring, a machine of sorts for hitting -- so (apparently)
emotionless that even sparring partners were spooked by him.
"It's the eyes," one said. "They're blank and staring, always watching you. That blank look -- that's what gets you down." …
In addition to numerous novels and collections of short stories, JOYCE CAROL OATES has published several volumes of poetry, several books of plays, five books of literary criticism and the book-length essay "On Boxing," from which this is excerpted. A native of Lockport, she has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature and is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Copyright 1985 by The Ontario Review Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates Inc.
HEADLINE: BRADLEY STAGES A GARDEN PARTY
BYLINE: BY MIKE LUPICA
BILL BRADLEY SAYS, "The people who know me feel like they know me." It has something to do with the pull of sports in this country, even more to do with the pull of celebrity. Of all the men running for President this year, Bradley is the star.
It doesn't guarantee he'll get enough primary votes or wrest the nomination from Al Gore. If all it takes is celebrity, then Warren Beatty is already king.
Bill Bradley has been the kind of star Gore desperately wants to be since Bradley was a college basketball player at Princeton in the 1960s. …
He stopped to shake the hand of an attendant.
The man smiled at him and said, "Oh, I remember you."
Bradley asked if they had met.
The man said, "Oh, I remember you from that game against Cazzie."
The man was referring to Cazzie Russell and a game between Russell's University of Michigan team and Bradley's Princeton team in the semifinals of the Holiday Festival in 1964. This was at the old Garden on 49th St. Before Bradley was a Knick, before he played on one of the most storied sports teams of all time, this was his first great basketball night in New York, the one when he became a star here forever. …
November 14, 1999, Sunday
HEADLINE: Gore, Bradley have sharp differences on mixing
religion and politics
BYLINE: By Jodi Enda
MEMPHIS, Tenn. _ When it comes to God and politics, the Democratic presidential candidates are worlds apart.
And it's not necessarily because of what they believe.
Both Protestants who say they've had intense religious experiences, Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley display sharper differences on religion than on perhaps any other subject. While the two struggle to distinguish themselves on health care, poverty and education, it is their near-opposite approaches to God in the public arena that offer the starkest contrast to date of their personalities and leadership styles.
Bradley, a onetime evangelical Christian who proselytized his basketball teammates, won't discuss religion at all except to say that he believes in God. His soul, he says, is nobody's business.
Gore, who once attended divinity school, is willing, even eager, to discuss how his beliefs shape his life and intersect with his public duties. …
As a high school junior, the young basketball star attended a Fellowship of Christian Athletes conference in Wisconsin, where he heard sports heroes speak of Jesus "as if they were describing a friend," Bradley wrote. He said he was hit by a "rush of tears" as he latched onto the evangelical notion of Christ as personal savior.
"I felt that I would never be the same," he wrote. Returning to Crystal City, he proselytized his classmates and his team.
Two years later, the Princeton University freshman felt he had a " 'personal experience' with Jesus," he wrote, and began to think of himself as a Christian fundamentalist. As his basketball celebrity grew, he was invited to give testimony at churches throughout New Jersey. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he spoke at a Billy Graham crusade. …
HEADLINE: Here's the Dirt on Baseballs
BYLINE: By STEVE STRUNSKY
THE best mud in New Jersey may be the best in baseball.
The balls pitched and hit in major- and minor-league games are not the gleaming white fresh-from-the-box bullets that fire the imagination of Little Leaguers. Before a big-league umpire yells "Play ball," he has already dirtied six dozen baseballs for the game, rubbing them with a special mud mix to soften the leather. Otherwise, say the people who know about these things, pitchers' fingers would blister and batters would be blinded by glare.
So where does that essential mythic mud originate? Somewhere in New Jersey, although just where it comes from and how it is processed are secrets as closely guarded as nuclear launch codes, or the recipe for Coca-Cola.
"It comes from the ground, and I have a special process that I don't divulge to anybody," said the man behind the mud, Burns Bintliff of Largo, Fla. "The man who started it wanted it that way. It was started in 1938, and it's come from the same place ever since." …
He steadfastly refused to say what made his mud right for its purpose, and he refused to confirm anything written about him or his mud. A 1982 article in The New York Times said the mud came from near Pennsauken Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River, in Burlington County. At the time of the article, an analysis conducted at The Times's request by a Princeton University professor found that 90 percent of the mud was finely ground quartz, probably pulverized by ice that covered New Jersey during the Pleistocene Epoch more than 10,000 years ago. …
HEADLINE: A Highway to Music Heaven
BYLINE: By LESLIE KANDELL
YES, there have been jokes ad nauseam about culture, or lack thereof, of the bridge and tunnel crowd.
But to attend New Jersey's wealth of music and dance performances is to understand that the state is replenished -- stuffed, even -- by those bridges and tunnels. Renowned artists from those cities and the whole world come not only to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Academy of Music, but also to stages just over, or under, the river in convenient New Jersey.
First, it must be said that the state boasts a disproportionate quantity of locally resident but nationally recognized musical talent. In the last four years, George Walker of Montclair and Melinda Wagner of Ridgewood have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes in music. Of nine Guggenheim Fellowships awarded nationally last spring, two went to Jerseyans: Andrew Cyrille, a jazz drummer from Montclair who fuses traditional African rhythms with contemporary jazz, and Paul Koonce, an assistant professor of music at Princeton University whose compositions blend technology with environmental sounds. …
HEADLINE: Art With Meaning Close to Home
BYLINE: By WILLIAM ZIMMER
ALL politics is local, but not all art. Yet museums and other art institutions in New Jersey have shown a special knack for making the exotic, the far-flung or the arcane relevant to their patrons' daily lives. …
THE Art Museum at Princeton University sometimes puts on a blockbuster in which a viewer who knows next to nothing about the subject feels a little giddy coming out; if he hasn't exactly learned to swim through the arcane material, he has at least learned how to float in it.
This year, "The Embellished Image," an elaborate presentation of Chinese calligraphy, was such a show. Through outsized and brilliantly rendered historical examples, the exhibition taught the viewer how to detect the tenor of a work of calligraphy. In 1993 "Goddess and Polis: The Pan-Athenaic Festival in Ancient Athens," devoted to the iconography on Greek vases, did not condescend to casual viewers, but instead brought them along carefully. …
HEADLINE: ZEN AND THE ART OF BECOMING A PRESIDENT
BYLINE: Kathleen Kenna
Low-key Bradley takes high road presidential politics is another ball game
IF YOU didn't already know that Bill Bradley was an Olympic gold medalist, three-time basketball All-American and Hall of Famer, Rhodes scholar, bestselling author, New York Knicks star for 10 years and U.S. senator for 18 years, then there would be nothing so remarkable about this man loping through Spanish Harlem.
Amid the tenements and the trash, the morning sidewalk boozers and the cocky sunflowers in the rundown communal garden in this barrio, Bradley is a bit rumpled, a bit awkward, and not a bit presidential.
He is literally a head above the crowd, ducking slightly to clear the entrance of 104-year-old Union Settlement House, yet still grazing the door frame with his thinning hair.
If there is any place in America that Bradley's resume or stature doesn't impress, it's here, in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in one of the richest cities on Earth. …
Bradley and Gore are praised widely as intellectuals in a race that lacks deep thought - Bush's grammar is worse than his grasp of world affairs - but Bradley wears his introspection better than his trademark rumpled wardrobe.
He is still the Princeton University basketball star who read Russian history in the locker room, the honours student who, when he graduated, rejected an offer from the Knicks and enrolled instead at Oxford.
''The examined life has become one of my ideals,'' he writes in his memoir. …
HEADLINE: Official Fighting Charges
BYLINE: S.U. Mahesh Journal Staff Writer
Motion: Arrest On Indian Land Illegal
State Director of Indian Affairs Regis Pecos wants misdemeanor criminal charges against him dismissed because he claims Santa Fe police had no authority to arrest him on Indian-owned land within the city limits.
However, the city prosecutor and police said Pecos' arrest fell within an intergovernmental agreement to preserve peace and public safety on Indian land.
Santa Fe police arrested Pecos on the Santa Fe Indian School property after responding to a report of a shooting May 29.
When officers responded to the call and wanted to speak with Pecos, he became combative and demanded they shoot him, a Santa Fe police report said. Police said he was intoxicated at the time. …
Pecos has been the director of the Office of Indian Affairs for New Mexico for the past 16 years. He served two terms as lieutenant governor of Cochiti Pueblo.
However, a police incident report lists Pecos' occupation as "unemployed," while the jail booking records show his occupation as "self" employed.
A graduate of Princeton University, Pecos also is a member of Princeton's board of trustees. He became the first Native American ever to serve on an Ivy League school board of trustees in 1997 when Princeton alumni elected him to the post.
November 12, 1999
HEADLINE: As Threats of Violence Escalate, Primate Researchers
Stand Firm
BYLINE: ALISON SCHNEIDER
The scientists who work at Tulane University's Regional Primate Research Center are tired of being called monkey killers. They want to find cures for AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. They want to wipe out Lyme disease and leprosy.
And if animals need to die so that humans can live, so be it. That's the price of research, and they're willing to pay it. But few of them ever expected that the price tag might include their own lives as well.
Last month, a radical animal-rights group that calls itself the "Justice Department" mailed 87 letters booby-trapped with razor blades to primate researchers around the country. …
Some members of the animal-rights movement are uncomfortable with the tactics of the "Justice Department." In fact, the movement is split down the middle on the ethics of threatening the lives of researchers in order to further their cause.
"I deplore those tactics," says Peter Singer, Princeton University's recently appointed professor of bioethics and the author of Animal Liberation (Random House, 1975), a cornerstone of the animal-rights movement. "It's completely wrong. The movement's strength is that it has a sound moral basis. When it does things like this, it loses the clear moral basis for its actions and risks losing public sympathy." …
HEADLINE: PRINCETON SEEKING GO-TO GUY
BYLINE: TIM LEONARD, Staff Writer
DATELINE: PRINCETON
Bill Carmody never has wanted to be known for having depth on the Princeton men's basketball team. The fourth-year coach regards the word in a negative manner, as if a team with depth doesn't have that special player every team needs when a game is on the line.
Carmody also knows Princeton graduated two such players in Brian Earl and Gabe Lewullis. He's wondering who will step up into that role.
Carmody has the unpleasant task of trying to replace Earl, the Ivy League Player of the Year, and All-Ivy first-teamer Lewullis, who had been the last two remaining starters from the 1997-98 team that went 27-2 and got as high as No. 7 in the national polls. …
Earl and Lewullis finished their careers as the school's No. 1 and No. 3 three-point shooters, respectively. The duo made 134 of Princeton's 229 three-pointers last season. Carmody hopes junior guard C.J. Chapman can ease the loss from long range. If Mike Bechtold can get healthy from the leg injuries that ruined his freshman season, he could also contribute. …
HEADLINE: Princeton basketball builds strong winning
tradition
BYLINE: By Jeff Passan, Daily Orange
DATELINE: Syracuse, N.Y.
The program starts with the mere dribble of a basketball. A star player comes and goes, giving the program name recognition. A coach who would become a legend hops on board. It evolves into something more intricate with a few backdoor cuts here and some frustrating defense there. Conference championships follow. National recognition ensues.
A cult legend is born.
So is the story of Princeton University basketball, now an institution on the map of major college hoops. The little Ivy League school with an enrollment of 4,565, a scholarship count of zero and a unique hardwood style still survives in college ball's vast world of alley-oops, behind-the-back passes and thundering jams.
The Tigers swim with the sharks each year, recording an out-of-conference schedule that would make Duke cringe. And, to no one's surprise, they hang with the big boys. …
Princeton dribbles well. Princeton passes well. Princeton shoots well. Above all else, Princeton frustrates. They do it with their sneaky backdoor cuts, their tricky passes, their suffocating defense. …
HEADLINE: Funds to Hire Russian Atom Scientists Cut
BYLINE: Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
A sharp cut in funding will force the Department of Energy to curtail its effort to employ Russian nuclear scientists in civilian jobs and keep them from peddling their bomb-building talents to other countries, officials say.
The $7.5 million appropriated by Congress last month for the so-called Nuclear Cities Initiative in 2000 is half of what was allocated this year and a quarter of what the Energy Department requested. As a result, the administration will limit the program to scientists in one Russian nuclear city instead of three, said Rose Gottemoeller, the director of the department's nonproliferation office.
The program began in September 1998 as a response to desperate economic conditions in Russia's ''secret'' cities, which during the Soviet era were ringed with security fences and did not appear on official maps but received special supplies of food and luxury goods.
Since the end of the Cold War, the special supplies have stopped, Russia's production of nuclear weapons has plummeted, and many nuclear workers have lost their jobs. The 17 facilities that make up the Russian nuclear weapons complex once built as many as 4,000 warheads a year but now produce just 200 to 300, said Oleg Bukharin, a Princeton University expert.
Nevertheless, the complex still employs 100,000 professionals in seven former secret cities in and around Moscow, about twice the number of facilities and four times as many nuclear weapons workers as in the United States, according to Mr. Bukharin. …
NOTE: This story also appeared in the International Herald-Tribune.
Reimer, J. Squier, 67
REIMER-J. Squier. Of Katonah, New York. Died at his home on November 17, 1999. He was 67 years old and was born October 21, 1932 in New York, N.Y. to Otto and Ursula Squier Reimer. He attended and graduated from The Choate Rosemary Hall School and Princeton University. Mr. Reimer served in the United States Army obtaining the rank of 1st Lieutenant. He was the former Managing Director of First Boston Corp in New York, N.Y. & Vice Chairman of the Visiting Nurse Service of Hudson Valley and the Director of the Katonah Community Center. …
Beaty, John Thurston, M.D., 82
BEATY-John Thurston, M.D. 82. On Friday, November 12, 1999, in Waynesville, NC. He was formerly of Rye, NY, and Greenwich, CT, and was a current resident of Waynesville, NC. He was educated at Princeton University and Columbia Medical School. He specialized in the practice of alternative medicine in Greenwich, CT, for 47 years. He is survived by his wife, Catherine Randall Beaty, one daughter, three sons, one grandson, three step-children, five stepgrandchildren, one sister and two brothers. A memorial service will be held in Waynesville, NC. Memorials may be made to "Survival Until A Cure" (ALS), 980 Post Road East, Suite 2, Westport, CT 06880. For further information contact Wells Funeral Home in Waynesville, NC.
Inventor And Squash Champ Calvin Maccracken, 79
Byline: Adam Geller, Staff Writer
Calvin D. MacCracken, a prolific inventor and champion squash player who devised everything from a portable ice rink to the slow-rolling hot dog grill, died Wednesday. …
Mr. MacCracken spent his life as an inventor, with a mind that displayed a knack for creativity from childhood. He liked to tell the story of how, as a 3-year-old, he invented a new and better way of tying his shoes. …
In 1987, Mr. MacCracken was one of the original inductees into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, along with greats such as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. For years after, at the hall's annual banquet, he would stand around fielding questions from admiring novices, said Lucye Millerand, the hall's program coordinator. …
A memorial service will be held next summer in West Cornwall, Conn., where the family spent their summers. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that contributions be sent to the Alzheimer's Program at Kendall at Hanover, 80 Lyme Road, Hanover, N.H. 03755. Contributions may also be sent to support the Calvin Dodd MacCracken Senior Thesis/Project Award at Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08540.
Timothy Adams Pfeiffer, 83
Timothy Adams Pfeiffer, 83, of Brunswick, Maine, a former State Department employee, died Nov. 8 at home from emphysema. He was the husband of Sophia Douglass Wells.
Born in New York City, he was a son of the late Timothy Newell Pfeiffer and Eleanor Knox Wheeler.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1937 and taught briefly at the American School in Haiti and later at the American University in Beirut.
In 1950, he took over the Turkish and Central Asian desks at the Voice of American in New York. He served with the U.S. Embassy in Karachi, Pakistan, from 1954 to 1956, and later was First Secretary at the Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, and liaison officer with the Central Treaty Organization. He later served in Washington with the State Department until retiring in 1970. …
Eve Kraft, 73, Tennis Coach And Author
Eve F. Kraft, a tennis teacher, coach, author and the founder and former executive director of the Education and Research Committee of the United States Tennis Association, died Thursday at Princeton Hospital.
She was 73 years old and lived in Princeton, N.J.
The cause of death was cancer, her family said. …
In 1971, when Princeton University first admitted women, Kraft became the women's varsity tennis coach, leading the team to an undefeated record for the three years of her tenure. …
HEADLINE: Lawyer Thomas Vincent Monahan, 75
Thomas Vincent Monahan, 75, a Washington native and retired Winchester lawyer who had served as president of the Virginia Bar Association in 1975, died of cancer Nov. 13 at his home in Winchester, Va.
Mr. Monahan, who practiced civil law in Winchester from 1954 to 1998, was a past president of both the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association and the Winchester-Frederick County Bar Association. …
He attended Princeton University before entering the Army in 1943. He later received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in 1947. …
Jo Valentine Morgan Jr., Lawyer, 79
Jo Valentine Morgan Jr., 79, a corporate lawyer and partner at Jackson & Campbell PC in Washington from 1985 until retiring in 1995, died of congestive heart failure Nov. 13 at ManorCare nursing home in Potomac. He lived in Bethesda.
He had been affiliated with the Washington law firm of Whiteford, Hart, Carmody & Wilson from the late 1940s until it folded in 1985. He had made partner in 1953 and senior partner in 1976.
Mr. Morgan, whose father was the first judge of the D.C. Tax Court, was born in Washington and graduated from Wilson High School. He was a 1942 graduate of Princeton University and a 1947 graduate of Yale Law School. …