Word: thingness
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...perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Class is its conclusion. After all the edgy incidents it offers, when we come to the last day of school, the students are hard-pressed to recall anything useful or even memorable that they learned. They have, in effect, been babysat, kept off the streets. We gain the strongest impression of the education machinery taking a little rest before clanking onward, in the largest sense indifferent to the needs of its charges, the best efforts of its functionaries. We guess that the smart kids will come out all right finally. We also guess...
Germans are people too! [Laughs.] I don't remember saying that you should embrace your heritage. I'm not saying that's not true, though. It's a good thing. [Your heritage] is part...
...weird that second-tier Cabinet appointees get so much attention initially; they rarely make much news once they're in office. That's why I've proposed shrinking the Cabinet, which has doubled in size yet probably halved in importance since the Kennedy Administration. But that's one thing Obama does not appear likely to change. Judging by his appointments thus far, the Cabinet will continue to be an irrelevant institution, while policy will still be made out of the White House. (See the top 10 Cabinet members...
...state attorney general Lisa Madigan has appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court to invoke an obscure law to declare Blagojevich unfit (at least temporarily) for office. Over the weekend, there were media reports that Blagojevich could resign as early as Monday. But late Sunday, his spokesperson denied any such thing, and others insisted that the governor, who claims he has done nothing wrong, will fight the charges with a new lawyer who doesn't shy away from taking the toughest cases to trial (and who happened to represent a co-defendant of Blagojevich's scandal-stained predecessor, George Ryan...
...There are differences too, of course. For one thing, today's terrorists have replaced Marxist ideology with religion. But that distinction may not be as great as we think. "If it was just about religion it wouldn't have the same impact," says Hoffman. "Religion is just the glue that holds it together, but it's not the most important part. It's political...