Word: comparisons
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...Salinger's name erased and replaced by Portman's. "I always felt a lot of people might have been faking the adulation of it, to impress their parents or their teachers," says Portman. Plus, he knew that writing about a disaffected, sensitive young man with father issues would invite comparison. "So I said, 'What if the character made it a symbol for everything that is wrong in the world?' I thought it would be funny...
There's also the art of the flawed comparison. Officials are fond of reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example, drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from a new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub. For most of us, the apples of drowning...
...arrogant, ignorant Westerners who overrate their own cultures. Dominik Mauer Augsburg, Germany The Measure of a Nation Your story "America by the numbers" [Nov. 6] was an interesting and thought-provoking way to commemorate the U.S. population's reaching 300 million. But I was struck by the comparison of the map illustrating the Electoral College votes in the 2004 presidential election and the "purple" map showing how people actually voted by county. When I look at those maps, there's little wonder why voter turnout in U.S. elections is embarrassingly low. Why bother to vote when a simple majority...
...This comparison yields figures worthy of pause. It suggests the existence of an implicit quota on the numbers of Asian-American students at some schools. (Asian-Americans make up about 4.5 percent of the nation’s population, but only 10 percent to 30 percent of students at elite U.S. universities.) But there are two reasons why the score gap is not as startling as it should seem. First, the nature of affirmative action exaggerates the differences in measures of academic success for which it is trying to correct. For instance, students of color, who tend to be poorer...
...priced for the future too. In the U.S., Sony is charging $500 for the 20-gigabyte edition and $600 for the 60-GB box. (By comparison, the Xbox 360 costs $300 for a basic version and $400 for one with a hard drive; the Nintendo Wii console costs $250.) Throw in a few PS3 games, at $60 a pop, and you're out $900--a sum that may scare off consumers. And PS3 already frightens stock analysts. "We do not believe the machine provides incentives for buyers to buy a new machine ... except some game maniacs," Merrill Lynch analyst Hitoshi...