We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Among others, outside of our families, who have left lasting positive impressions on us, some teachers and coaches stand out in all of our minds.
(I combine teachers with coaches because they serve the same relationship functions - guidance, pushing, criticizing, inspiring, and cheerleading of efforts that, in the end, only the person can do themselves within their own minds and bodies. For better or worse, we are not empty vessels into which things can be poured.)
For all of everybody's frustration with the government school monopoly, unions, the insane notion of universal higher education, and obsolete and stultifying educational methods which work best only for the most submissive, obedient, or motivated students, every reader of Maggie's has memories of teachers or coaches who made a big difference in their life.
I was fortunate to have had many of them. Interestingly, where I spent my most formative years, each teacher had to be a sports coach too. They were "Sir" in class, but you were allowed to call them "Coach" on the field, in the pool, or on the rinks.
Let's hear about them, in the comments. (I will put some of mine in there, too.)
It's been said (by whom? Dickens? Mark Twain? Homer?) that only a fool would write without compensation. That makes us, and most non-commercial (or de facto non-commercial) website volunteer writers, fools. I am a fool, always have been, and I make no bones about it.
The lawsuit against Mrs. Huffington cracks me up. For their own personal or career reasons, they offered to volunteer their efforts to her enterprise, unpaid, without any equity - and without taking any business risk at all. All they had to do was to mail it in, and their names would be in HuffPo lights. Instant fame! Their free choice. Now, they see dollar signs and want to change the deal and cash out.
That's the greedy, envy-driven Left for you. When Bird Dog sells the sinfully-profitable Maggie's Farm (which he created and for which he tries to ride herd on the willful and cranky volunteer posters) to Google for a trillion zillion dollars, he had better take me out for a good dinner at Hooters, with dessert, or I will never take him fishing again.
It would be decent and gracious for Mrs. HuffPo to show some appreciation and gratitude. At the very least, a big dinner at Hooters and a framed Certificate of Appreciation would be nice.
Each chapter is the story of one man, his dilemmas, his challenges, the deaths of those close to him, his defense of his family and land. These soldiers relate vivid and compelling accounts of their lives and their experiences, including attempts to maintain their sense of humanity in the face of inner and outer battles and stresses, while still becoming better soldiers at the same time.
Rules of Misbehavior - Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?
The man is not Ann Landers. Holding sexual pleasures and adventure as the centerpiece of life, he seems to have come up with a simple ethic: Let them know what you are doing before you do it.
Our North Africa trip, with Egypt, plus Israel and a bit more of my beloved Turkey (southern coast) plan for September has been cancelled because Egypt, Tunisia, etc seem iffy right now. A shame. I wanted to get back on a ship. Readers know I love ships and boats, and I was in the mood for an exotic trip.
Mrs. BD also vetoed my alternative notion of a big house in Provence, to invite friends and family - and all of our Maggie's readers - to visit. She wants to give the kids time to get a bit more settled in their lives first.
She wants the land of the Umbri, with just grumpy Bird Dog and a rental car. Assisi, Orvieto (I do not like their wines), Perugia, Todi, Spoleto, etc. Etruscan walled cities and Hannibal's victories at Lake Trasimene, and Roman highway towns on the Via Flaminia. Maybe a day trip back up to Siena. OK by me. Love Italia, as my Brit cousins do - as long as there is no pasta or red sauce. And Mrs. BD has been working hard on her Italian. Dove cabineto?
Next year, God willing, either a south of France villa like this one, or the North Africa trip, but this seems not the year for that. Who makes the plans calls the shots.
I'll bring cameras of course, to bore our readers with my travel pics, but I'd be surprised if any of the old castle and rustic villa agritourismo inns Mrs. BD has picked out have Wifi. (When places say they have it, it's usually not working when you are there.)
Photo above is Assisi, a major tourist trap thanks to St. Francis' marketing skills.
An esterni view of one of the old inns where Mrs. BD informs me we'll be staying - Abbazia San Pietro in Valle :
Such places are good reasons to save one's pennies. It all looks good to me. I am always happy to be banging around Italy (except Rome), although I have already done a lot of it. Thanks, Mrs. BD, for taking the time to plan it so thoughtfully.
I am sorry we cannot meet up with my wife's late cousin, Archbishop Prata, on our Italian trips anymore. I think of him every time I head for Italy. He was full of vitality and full of the joy of the Spirit - and could make doors open like you would not believe with a flash of his ring. Besides Jesus, the Church, and the Mass, he loved opera, food, wine, his relatives, Limoncello, Hazelnut gelato, and Italian pastries. An intellectual sort, he had been a professor and university president before they brought him back to the Vatican. My lad and he used to chat in conversational Latin. Very cool for them. We all miss Gennaro.
Friend just surprised me with a gift in the mail - a first edition of Massachusetts author Louise Dickinson Rich's 1942 We Took To The Woods. Knew about it, never read it. I will.
Now I am older. I have met with poverty, flood, famine, hurricane, brutalizing labor, and illness, on extremely personal grounds. I have seen the sudden and tragic deaths of those nearest and dearest to me. I have had to shoulder responsibilities, for which I am ill fitted, and the much more difficult burden of sudden, if brief, fame. I have been hard pressed for money, as we say in Maine. I’m not whining. I’ve had a wonderful life, with the joys far outweighing the sorrows. But still, in all, there have been times when I was fair to middlin’ desperate.
There was time when my husband and my year-old son and my mother-in-law and I had one meal a day. We ate baked potatoes and salt. It didn’t do us adults any harm, and my neighbor woman, Alice Miller, provided me with six oranges and six quarts of milk a week—she kept two cows—for the baby. She said her doctor’s book said that babies needed it.
Then there was the time in December. My husband and I were laughing together over a silly joke in the evening after dinner, relaxed in our slippers before the open fire. We’d spent the day snugging down the cabin for winter, and we felt good knowing that there were forty miles of lake and impossible road between us and the nearest settlement. We were having fun. “Louise, you gorgeous fool,” he said, and died.
Bruce linked about that this morning. I am more inclined to ask "What is music?" than "What is art?"
Impossible questions are usually the wrong questions. "What is art?" is the wrong question. Is this art?
That's an H&E- stained microscopic slide of the human Pituitary gland. A bit of the Anterior and the Posterior, with the margin. Absolutely beautiful. You could hang it on a wall, art or not. I call it "God's art."
Another pic of God's Art below the fold, which Gwynnie stumbled on while fishing his stream the other day -
Since posting my E. 4th St. pics yesterday, I've been looking at some NYC real estate - for fun, not to buy. The East Village is by no means a fancy area. I focused on E. 4th because that's where I took my pics on Sunday.
They are asking a mere $519,000 for this 600 sq foot 1 1/2 bedoom on the 5th floor of a walk-up. Great for your legs, those 5th-floors:
I could not find a single available rental on E. 4th, but maybe I didn't try enough. Still, demand is strong. I think many of the young folk are doubling and tripling up to make their rents with the average 2 BR walk-up running from $4000/month and up - and in elevator buildings up to $10,000/mo - in this funky old neighborhood which was considered a semi-slum some years back.
I remember it well - Mrs. BD attended Tisch (before she was Mrs. BD, and when it was known as NYU School of the Arts and was housed in a huge old industrial loft building with only a freight elevator, yet was still maybe second only to Juilliard for the performing arts). The Fillmore East was there too, and I have memories of that: Leon Russell, Allman Brothers, Dr. John, etc.
Looking at the listings makes me wonder who all these people are who want to pay, or are able to pay, $10,000/month rent for smallish apartments in the East Village (referring to east of Greenwich Village).
And looking at the listings reminds me that, if you live in Manhattan and do not have money to burn to spend on housing, you sleep in your apartment - you don't live in it. You live at your gym or club or pub or cafe or library or park or meetings or dinners or work or wherever. Otherwise, the claustrophobia can get pretty ugly for those who are not used to it. I think so many New Yorkers run and jog and bike just to get the heck out of their little boxes.
Funny, though, when I think that I probably spend 90% of my time at home within 10% of my home living space - but that is by choice.
I confess, Readers, that I still get a kick out of New York. Vital, colorful, messy, unpredictable, and jam-packed with talented people.
Pics from yesterday afternoon. The East Village (not to mention the Lower East Side) has become a wonderful, youthful neighborhood, and the old walk-up "tenements" seem just fine abodes for the youth who flock to NYC although they lack the doormen, gyms with pools, laundry rooms etc. that the new buildings offer. The rents, alas, are not cheap in these old places -
Very good essay on the fate of Detroit - and similar cities - by Wretchard: The Field of Dreams. A quote:
Mayor Bing’s plan to build developments recalls nothing so much as the South Seas cargo cults who believed all that was necessary to make the skies rain with goodies was to build a dirt airstrip and palm-leaf control tower to attract resupply flights from somewhere. “If you build it, they will come”.
Who “they” is remains unclear. But they are out there.
As Glenn Reynolds said (who he quotes):
The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Change rarely comes from the outside, in. Recall "urban renewal." Now, those brownstone "slums" that didn't get torn down go for millions in New York, while the "modern" and "dignified" public housing projects are nightmares, socio-cultural wastelands which even cops are reluctant to enter.
Sipp informed me that the historic landmark, The Hotel Harris, is for sale. It seems to be more of a boarding house, or SRO, or apartment house, than a hotel these days.
Downtown Rumford is half boarded-up, but the hotel houses Brian's Bistro, which I am told is quite good. Haddock cooked three ways on the menu.
Cafe Boeuf? Naw. Rumford isn't Lake Wobegon. Is it? We may hate Garrison Keillor's sanctimony and condescension when it comes to politics, but otherwise he can be darn perceptive and amusing in his fiction.
You have to half-crazy to move to Rumford, Maine. Hardly anybody moves to Maine anymore, much less Rumford. Maybe Portland, for a summertime-only retirement (six months plus one day in Florida, and no state income taxes to pay - and estate tax advantages to when you get to that point).
Winter is a wonderful, lovely thing, but, unless you are a skiier, it goes on too long up there. (However, we were 26 degrees F this morning down here, thanks to the crisis of Global Cooling.) You cannot grow tomatoes in your garden up there unless you build a greenhouse but that's not too hard - you just throw a couple of layers of polyurethane over some old boards in the sun next to the back of the house. "Just put some bleachers out in the sun..."
The Northeast is full of dying old towns where the best jobs are government jobs and where industry has fled for friendlier climes with friendlier taxation. In my opinion, if you move to a place in the hinterlands with a 6,000 population, you had really better love your spouse - and your family.
Little old Rumford is fortunate, however, to have its own online newspaper, the Rumford Meteor. It's good for keeping up with the town's main forms of recreation, which appear to be DUI and marijuana. However, from the reports, towns like Rumford still have their cadres of good old reserved and private Yankee small town folk who go to church and whose kids will play football and go to wars and want to work. They will mostly leave town, for sure, but some won't.
When I think about it, I realize that maybe I have to be at least half-crazy to live where I live, too. But my friends are here - and my church and my work - and I can get to good olde NYC once in a while - so I guess I will stay put. Nothing is perfect.
For me, Maine means grouse hunting and Moose filet mignon and Bert and I. I've heard that Sugarloaf is great, but never tried it. Too long of a drive, and the delights of skiing are hassle enough.
I grew up on The New York Times. Delivered, every morning, even before they had a national edition. Read it every morning, through high school and college. An essential part of breakfast.
The second factor in the Times’s decline was the ascension of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to the perch of publisher in 1992. Having come of age in the sixties counterculture, Sulzberger moved to shift the paper’s focus from its historical commitment of reporting the news “without fear or favor” to the more activist promise to “enhance society.” In particular, Sulzberger wanted the paper to promote “diversity” and to move beyond what he disparaged as the “predominantly white, straight, male version of events.” As the author of Coloring the News, a critical look at the politically correct mania for “diversity” and its damaging effect on the news media, McGowan writes as an authority on the Times’s transformation. The change was most obvious in the paper’s increasingly strident editorial pages, but the news content, which began taking its cues from editorial, suffered as well. Times veterans groused that the paper risked compromising its news coverage with a newly ideological agenda, but Sulzberger dismissed such concerns, declaring that he was “setting a moral standard.”
A newspaper's job to set a moral standard? Grandiose? How about just giving us the real facts with tough, skeptical, half-drunk cranky journalists instead of metrosexual twits, and we'll take care of the morality part ourselves. We're Americans, not illiterate ignoramuses who need to be taught how to think correctly by our superiors who filter and slant our information "for our own good." Propagandists, exploiting their historic franchise.
I quit The Times years ago because it would make me begin my day in an irritable mood. Irritated with them for quitting their job. Now, I catch up with Maggie's for breakfast, and so does She Who Must Be Obeyed. Imagine that!
- the attitude that society should be governed by an elite group of individuals
- 1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources. 2. (A) The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class. ...
- someone who believes in rule by an elite group
Well, if you perused my pedigree, resume, career, J. Press tweedy and conservative life style, and the respectable, intelligent, accomplished, well-educated, well-behaved and refined people with whom I tend to associate, some might consider me one of America's elite. Given the definitions I found, however, I am not: I have no interest in power or control over anybody, and despise anybody who thinks they deserve that position. I lack all desire to tell anybody how to live other than myself, and I am not even especially good at that. Beneath my superficial aspects beats the simple heart of my free, crusty and cantankerous independent Yankee farmer ancestors who had far more freedom than we have today.
For example, when it comes to politics, the only politicians I trust are the crooked ones. They don't seek power over me and have no plans to make my life "better" - they just want money, chicks, easy jobs without meaningful accountability, and maybe some support for their weak egos. Let them have that if that's what they need, just so long as they leave me, my life, and my hard-earned assets alone. I will not be an obedient and passive serf like some of my Brit ancestors doubtless were, sending most of their grain or wool to their superiors.
We are not an aristocracy here. Let the elites figure out how to run their own lives (in general, I am not impressed), instead of trying to run mine. A few relevant links:
A friend who recently moved to New England from Texas asked me for a few good long-weekend getaway spots (to get away from their kids for romance, with good food and good hiking, regardless of season). It's important to couples to get away from it all - daily life routine, internet, rug rats, dogs, - to refresh the relationship.
I don't really like to stay in an inn without a fireplace in the room, but off the top of my head, I offered these (with a range of luxuriousness), although I am sure readers have their own lists of favorites:
What is needed is a renewed humility. We are not the masters of the sources of happiness; they ever elude the appointments we make with them, springing up when we least expect them and fleeing when we would hold them close. The excessive ambition to expunge all that is weak or broken in body or mind, to control moods and states of soul, sadness, chagrin, moments of emptiness—all this runs up against our finitude, against the inertia of the human species, which we cannot manipulate like some raw material. We have the power to avoid or to heal certain evils, yes, but we cannot order happiness as if it were a meal in a restaurant.
The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.
Readers know that, much as I value whatever joy and contentment come my way, I find "happiness" difficult to define and, furthermore, do not view it as a particularly meaningful or important goal of life as if is often defined. For example, if performing painful or sacrificial duties is what is satisfying to you, then how can you construct a universal definition of "happiness" when the word may mean "ease and comfort" to another person?
Sometimes I think morality is purely culturally-defined, and sometimes I think there is "natural law." Most of the time I simply try to adhere to God via the Ten Commandments and Christ's teachings (Mark 12:28):
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
If you are a Christian, those are the revealed word of God. If not, they are cultural. I know when I have done wrong because I feel guilt and shame. Sometimes I feel guilt and shame even when I haven't transgressed in any meaningful way. That's me, not God.
Sipp found this little ad for Whistler-Blackcomb, and I'm sure our kids and the friends we skiied with there will recognize the spots. Best skiing I've ever had, with fresh powder daily.
After a couple of days, we tended toward the Blackcomb side, but maybe partly because they had closed the very top of Whistler for dynamiting for avalanches. Cool. We did have fun skiing off a cliff and landing in powder over our heads. Sheesh. That was good for some giggles (later), trying to find one's poles and hats, etc.
Sipp correctly identified the video as "tilt-shift." That's new term to me.
My Lenten discipline this year focuses on gratitude.
I am disappointed by my tendency to get exasperated whenever something goes wrong in life, while taking for granted the 99.9% of things that go OK. For example, car goes 125,000 miles and provides a good service. Needs a new transmission? "Sh-t. Dammit. What a pain." Unexpected problems are always cropping up.
It's as if I carry some implicit expectation, hidden in the back of my mind, that life is or should be smooth and go right all the time. A sort of infantile utopian assumption probably partly engendered by growing up safe and comfortable in America in the 20th Century. It's a flaw, and I plan on going to war against it with gratitude for everything that goes well. For example, the fact that my heart continues to beat steadily and miraculously while I accept - and expect - that it cannot do so indefinitely.
Given time, some things will always go wrong or not work out well. When I am forced to be honest with myself, many of the things that go wrong are at least partly my own damn fault anyway, due to laziness, stubborness, poor judgement, boneheaded or wrong impulses, lack of planning, character defects, stupidity, ignorance, etc.
It's the opposite of the Wild Turkey phenomenon. People tell me that Turkey hunting must be easy, because they see Turkeys all the time. I remind them of all the times they don't see Turkeys - and tell them that's what most Turkey hunting is like.
Many have already read George Will's fine essay, Pencils and Politics. It's a brief intro to Econ 101. A quote:
Producing this simple, mundane device is, Ruth says, "an achievement on the order of a jazz quartet improvising a tune when the band members are in separate cities." An unimpressed student says, "So a lot of people work on a pencil. What's the big deal?" Ruth responds: Who commands the millions of people involved in making a pencil? Who is in charge? Where is the pencil czar?
Her point is that markets allow order to emerge without anyone imposing it. The "poetry of the possible" is that things are organized without an organizer.
Yes, it's the miracle (or poetry, or spontaneous order) of markets and the free flow of goods and services. Read the whole thing. Another quote:
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
When I think of trade and markets, I think of the paleolithic (500,000 years ago) trade in amber (for jewelry) and flint (for tools). Scandinavian amber being found in Italy. Or obsidian from Idaho being found in Indian sites on Long Island.
But when I think of pencils, I think of the Thoreau Pencil which, in the 1830s, was the finest pencil made in America. Thoreau supported himself during most of his life by working at that Pencil Factory. There is no reason to think that he enjoyed a minute of that work, but everybody has to make money.
We have to give Henry David Thoreau credit for this, though: He was a practical Civil Engineer and inventor and not just a dreamy transcendentalist with a love for nature and a way with words.
"...my eye caught The Gospel of John. Now this was the film I meant to see in February 2004 when The Passion of the Christ came out, but I missed the brief window of opportunity for catching it here in Fresno. Slasher flicks play for weeks and weeks and weeks at the monsterplexes, but at the brave art theater, gospel films (without Mel's name attached), sad to say, don't."
While I do not believe that a parent owes a kid a free college education, I think it can be a heck of a nice present for a kid who is eager for it, and can use it. Those without an avid hunger to learn things in a formal format need not apply.
Nothing is more costly, or more over-priced, than education today. At the same time, knowledge has never been more available and accessible - few people remember more about Plato from college than they can read as a refresher on Wiki. (I always believed in reading an encyclopedia entry on a topic before studying it, to get oriented.)
With some gracious grand-parental assistance, we have paid for private college 2 1/2 times thus far - one half to go. Prep-schools too, but that's another story. (Like the Obamas and Clintons and most Dems, we are not huge fans of government schools when it comes to our own kids. It's an investment - we expect them to take care of us in our old age when we are broke or broken-down - and will be happy to do the same for our parents if and when they want it or need it.)
Because most colleges and universities today have relatively few standards about what a college-educated person ought to know, I had to do it myself. Re-inventing the wheel, you might say, because Socrates and Aristotle might have made a comparable list.
Here are Bird Dog's Basic, Minimum Requirements for payment for his kids' "higher" educations, whether in school or outside of formal schooling (high school AP counts, as does a serious approach to a Teaching Company course):
1. Calculus 2. A Shakespeare course 3. The Bible 4. Physics, Chem, and Bio. I would have liked to see some Organic and Biochem in there too, so they could understand what's in the newspapers. These are not "difficult," but require some simple discipline. 5. Western Civ, Hammurabi thru Plato through Nietzsche 6. Western Lit, The Book of the Dead and Gilgamesh thru Homer and Hesiod through Melville 7. Art history 8. Music history 9. English Lit, minimum of 2 courses 10. Econ, macro and micro 11. Intro Geology 12. Intro Philosophy 13. American history (not from Zinn or some Lefty nut, but the real deal) 14. European history 15. One classical language - Greek or Latin, plus one modern language 16. Basic Business and Accounting (unfortunately, most of my kids' schools are too elite to offer such mundane and practical courses, but they need to learn this somewhere.)
I put "higher" in quotes because this doesn't sound very higher, does it? My requirements leave plenty of room for a major in Underwater Basket-weaving or Female Studies. (When I was in college, we did our studies of females mostly on weekends with beer, and usually flunked the quizzes.)
My kids have mostly kept to this. In my view, if you don't know this basic stuff, you are not fully schoolin'-eddicatedand not fully and cushily prepared, as the cliche goes, "for a lifetime of self-education and informed citizenship." After all, this stuff is just foundational and all of it could be self-learned, but college makes it more likely to happen, and a good guide is always helpful.
When you think about it, a decent high school ought to be able to do most or all of it. After all, they take four years to do two full years' worth of hard work. Why else did they call it "high" school? (My theory is that they slow it all down to the pace of the stragglers and slackers.)
I also advise them that any random course with a great teacher who knows everything about everything is worth many courses with ordinary profs in subjects they think they are "interested in." How do you know whether you are "interested in" something until you dig into it? Everything is interesting, in my opinion.
Finally, I expect them to earn their spending money. Jobs during college. (My lad bussed tables at the B-school faculty dining room while being reporter, editor, then Editor in Chief of the newspaper and running a softball team. My middle pupette was a restaurant receptionist, then a part-time assistant at Merrill-Lynch - while playing Div. 1 Tennis and majoring in Econ and Math. I don't know how they did it all. I admire their energy and initiative. My little one would too, but there are no jobs in a tiny college out in the lovely woods and fields of central Ohio. She works hard in the summer, though.)
What do you require of your kids?
(Pic is an old one-room schoolhouse in Westport, CT. Those kids could learn more than our kids do, as witness Abe Lincoln, John Adams, Tom Jefferson, etc. Of course, exceptional individuals who were highly motivated.)
In the seventies, not to put too fine a point on it, everyone was still alive. Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille were no longer making great work, but they were vivid, high-profile totems. Antony Tudor had one more great ballet in him: 1974’s The Leaves Are Fading. Robert Joffrey and his Joffrey Ballet were going full speed ahead, an audience-friendly ballet troupe that toured the country like a young, hip, and sometimes hippie version of the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Alvin Ailey, Eliot Feld, and Arthur Mitchell had companies that brought different demographics to the theater, and Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor finally had national stature and repertoires that placed them in the pantheon. Twyla Tharp was coming into her own, bringing her melting-pot style and antagonistic syntax to the mainstream when she choreographed Push Comes to Shove in 1974 for ABT and Baryshnikov. Meanwhile, at NYCB, Jerome Robbins was experimenting with different forms of narrative (Watermill, Dybbuk), and Balanchine was deep into the late phase of his genius, putting on festivals—Stravinsky in 1972, Ravel in 1975—and tossing off blockbuster ballets like Union Jack in 1976 and Vienna Waltzes in 1977. Vienna Waltzes, according to Kirstein, would rank as the company’s “most successful” ballet. “For four seasons every performance scheduled was sold out,” he wrote. “It brought into the theater a new public, many of whom had certainly never been in the State Theater before.”
Couple all this creative energy with cheap rents—for no artistic discipline needs as much space, from class to rehearsal to performance, as dance does—and you had yet another reason for the dance boom.
It's about time somebody wrote this essay. Prof. Thomas Reeves at Mercator: What do professors want?. h/t, Mankiw. He is harsh about the academic life:
On the Left and Right money means power, and we "pointy heads" and "eggheads" are on the outside looking in. One thinks of Arthur Schlesinger Jr swooning over the Kennedys for the rest of his life because they gave him a title and a silent seat in some White House deliberations. Those making as much money as, say, an experienced furnace repairman account for little in this world, despite the PhD. How many academics even sit on the governing board that sets policies for their campus? It is all most humiliating. (To see how intelligently and objectively academics use the authority they have, examine the political correctness the suffocates the employment practices and intellectual lives of almost all American campuses. Aberlour's Fifth Law: "Political correctness is totalitarianism with a diploma.")
and...
One way to compensate for this bleak and futureless existence is to become involved in left-wing causes. They give us a sense of identity in a world seemingly owned and operated by Rotarians. And they provide us with hope. In big government we trust, for with the election of sufficiently enlightened officials, we might gain full medical coverage, employment for our children, and good pensions. These same leftist leaders might redistribute income "fairly," by taking wealth from the "greedy" and giving it to those of us who want more of everything. A "just" world might be created in which sociologists, political scientists, botanists, and romance language professors would achieve the greatness that should be theirs. It's all a matter of educating the public. And hurling anathemas at people of position and affluence we deeply envy.
I am sure Prof. Reeves has tenure, but he might need police protection too, after writing that honest piece.
Among others, outside of our families, who have left lasting positive impressions on us, some teachers and coaches stand out in all of our minds. 
It's been said (by whom? Dickens? Mark Twain? Homer?) that only a fool would write without compensation. That makes us, and most non-commercial (or de facto non-commercial) website volunteer writers, fools. I am a fool, always have been, and I make no bones about it.
It's about the lives of Israeli citizen-soldiers. 
Friend just surprised me with a gift in the mail - a first edition of Massachusetts author Louise Dickinson Rich's 1942 
Sipp informed me that the historic landmark, 
Bruckner subtitles his essay in City Journal: 
My Lenten discipline this year focuses on gratitude. 
Many have already read George Will's fine essay, 
While I do not believe that a parent owes a kid a free college education, I think it can be a heck of a nice present for a kid who is eager for it, and can use it. Those without an avid hunger to learn things in a formal format need not apply.