To rake Harry Reid over the coals about his “no Negro dialect” comment will bring to mind the Biblical passage about trying to take a speck out of someone’s eye when you’ve got a log in your own. Pretty much all of America black and white feels exactly the way Harry Reid does about the way black people talk – and aren’t even worried about saying it out loud.
A new recycling idea is slowly catching on in restaurants and cities around the United States—the "zero waste" movement. The concept's simple enough: Produce less, avoid plastics and packaging that aren't biodegradable, recycle and compost what you can. With food waste making up some 13 percent of the junk that gets tossed in landfills, composting especially is becoming popular: Seattle has been offering residents separate that can be picked up for compost, and San Francisco has just made sorting mandatory.
Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided--the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don't have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis's 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438.
In his column today, Nicholas Kristof argues that the United States wastes massive amounts of money on its prison system. Why? Because we unnecessarily imprison some nonviolent offenders, namely drug users and dealers. The result, Kristof says, is that the government is investing vast sums in keeping people who aren't necessarily dangerous under lock and key--while our education and health care systems suffer from underfunding.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
By Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, 288 pp., $24.95)
Apart from Austin Powers, there can be few British institutions as groovy right now as The Economist. Der Spiegel has hailed its "legendary influence." Vanity Fair has written that "the positions The Economist takes change the minds that matter." In Britain, the Sunday Telegraph has declared that "it is widely regarded as the smartest, most influential weekly magazine in the world." In America, it is regularly fawned on as a font of journalistic reason.
When Major League Baseball let George Steinbrenner resume active ownership of the New York Yankees after his celebrated two-and-a-half-year banishment in 1993, it was like Commissioner Gordon telling Batman that the Joker had once again escaped from prison: it was only a matter of time before Gotham would be held hostage to some new outlandish threat. True to form, Steinbrenner soon began making noises about moving the Bronx Bombers out of the Bronx home where they've been for seventy-two years.
