Word: fishkin
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It’s all too easy to accept the status quo and cynically conclude that the American electorate just can’t do any better. But a recent book by Yale professor Bruce Ackerman and Stanford professor James Fishkin repudiates what conservatives like to call the soft bigotry of low expectations and proposes a radically innovative solution—a new national holiday they call Deliberation Day (which also happens to be the title of their book). Held two weeks before the presidential election, Deliberation Day would bring Americans together at thousands of sites across the country...
...restaurant, but in the back, and sleeping on the bus. They survive on their faith in baseball. After several bad breaks, Noah gets persuaded to try a gimmick. They put a ringer from the Negro League in a costume and introduce him as the Golem of Jewish legend. Fishkin, the team's pinch-hitter, explains the legend: "a golem is a creature that man creates to be a companion, a protector or a servant. But only God can grant a creature a soul and inevitably golems become destroyers." And so, as it must, disaster befalls the team when it introduces...
...Huckleberry Finn anyway? The most celebrated hobo hero in American literature took on a new dimension when Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, unveiled the research that went into her forthcoming book, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices...
Twain said Huckleberry Finn, the young narrator of his most famous book, was based on Tom Blankenship, a poor white boy in Hannibal, Mo. But Fishkin argues that Huck's voice was in part inspired by Jimmy, a 10-year-old black servant. Twain described this boy in an 1874 article in the New York Times as "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across." Added Twain: "He did not tell me a single remarkable thing, or one that was worth remembering. And yet he was himself so interested in his small marvels, and they flowed...
This potentially smacks of plebiscite democracy. TV call-in polls are about as representative as trying to gauge the mood of the country by listening to talk radio. As James Fishkin, chairman of the government department at the University of Texas, argues, "Electronic town meetings are just a device to step outside established political mechanisms -- to abandon traditional forms of representation and elections -- in order to acquire a mantle of higher legitimacy. And in the very worst case, it could be invoked toward extraconstitutional ends...