Word: argumentative
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...commonest argument I’ve heard on behalf of these inanities is that they help people to assure themselves they have, in fact, done the reading. As such, we should not hold them to any higher standard than absentminded doodling. The poet Collins ultimately comes to a similar conclusion: “We have all seized the white perimeter as our own / and reached for a pen if only to show / we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; / we pressed a thought into the wayside, / planted an impression along the verge...
...member of the Harvard men’s hockey team, I take exception to Lucy Caldwell’s article (“Are Jocks Necessary?” column, March 7) questioning the necessity of jocks at Harvard. While her argument is inherently flawed on the whole, there are a few major points of contention I found simply uninformed and inaccurate...
First, her argument that Harvard would do well to accept mediocrity in athletics is ridiculous. Harvard’s core creed is really to strive for excellence in everything it does; it only admits the best, brightest, and most talented students in the world. I don’t see why athletics should be an exception here. Through its history, Harvard has traditionally been an athletic power in certain sports, such as hockey, squash, and rowing, and its academic reputation has certainly not suffered because of this. Take a school like Stanford, which is widely renowned for being a powerhouse...
...published in this week’s issue of Time, they argue that any citizen asked to serve on a jury for a non-violent drug case should vote to acquit, no matter what the crime. It doesn’t matter whether or not you agree; if the argument interests you, you need to track down DVDs of “The Wire.” It’s rare that a television show can offer that kind of intellectual honesty to its viewers...
...downturn in the United States - which consumes a quarter of the world's energy - could drive down global demand for oil, and wind up hurting oil-rich countries. But OPEC's 13 oil ministers - whose countries account for about 40% of the world's oil supply - have heard that argument from U.S. officials before, and have rejected it at three meetings in the past six months, most recently in Vienna on March 5. There, U.S. foes Venezuela and Iran took a lead in arguing against raising oil output...