This Hits Home

Margaret Wente: Do you have any impression of the landscape [of post-secondary education] in Canada right now?

Camille Paglia: I'm not that familiar with Canada. But when I was at York University a few years ago, I thought, “Oh my god, they are so shallow. Such a backwater.”

‘A landscape of death in the humanities,’ Globe and Mail, April 30

The Tiger Woods Critical Reading Group

It's funny when you reach back out to the world outside your school life (it's nice to know it's still here) and realize that the big news these days is Tiger Woods's "transgressions."

Writers at the Globe and Mail and the CBC have exhausted all the gossip so now they've both analyzed Woods's PR crisis management strategies.

Let's read and compare in the morning.

• Tiger Woods's word team chooses carefully (Russell Smith, Globe and Mail)
• Tiger Woods needs new PR strategy (Malcolm Kelly, CBC Sports)

What Makes a Woman a Woman?

"While femininity may be relative — slipping and sliding depending on the age in which you live, your stage of life, what you’re wearing (quick: do tailored clothes underscore or undercut it?) even the height of the person standing next to you — biology, at least to some degree, is destiny, though it should make no never mind to women’s rights or progress....

"[I]dentity is not simply the sum of our parts. That’s what makes [Caster] Semenya — whose first name is usually conferred on a boy but happens to be Greek for “beaver” — so intriguing. Science may or may not be able to establish some medical truth about her, something that will be relevant on the playing field. But I doubt that will change who she considers herself to be."

-- PEGGY ORENSTEIN, "What Makes a Woman a Woman?"

(Found for Lauren on a Friday afternoon)

Unbelievable (and very often, heartbreaking) images honoured By the Pulitzer Prizes and Overseas Press Club this weekend for photographic reportage (at the Daily Beast).

In Defense of Rachel Maddow

Thanks to Ms. Rachel Page, the provider of all my magazine needs from January - May 2008, for introducing me to Rachel Maddow, the coolest person to hit the television airwaves in a while. Maddow is the host of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, which airs right after Keith Olbermann's Countdown (Ben Affleck did a pretty good, while long, impression of Olbermann on SNL last week but the video's been taken down temporarily).

Two nights ago, Stephen Colbert named Maddow the Queen of Cable; she's gathered a large following already so I'm a little slow here but will be an ardent fan. Full episodes are available for free on iTunes.

In any case, I've been doing my Googling and have found many, many articles like this, which insist that MSNBC is hiring nothing but left-leaning crazies.

Here's a good rundown of the conversation so far. And if you like Maddow, here's a glowing profile from New York Magazine, where I cribbed the nice portrait of Maddow.

The point- or rather, the question, which I have not been getting at but is on my mind, is how do you 'objectively' talk about something that is blatantly insane, scary, wrong (but also pro-conservative or -republican, for example)? Marc Ambinder and Andrew Sullivan thoughtfully answer: