Readworthies XV

A handful of interesting, informative, and insightful articles.

News, editorials, columns, essays, et al.

Handwriting is losing its presence in classrooms by Robert A. Frahm @ The Hartford Courant (ht):

As Daria Caruso's high school seniors watched the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film "North by Northwest" in an advanced English class, one scene, in particular, puzzled them. On the screen was a paper note, a message handwritten in cursive script.

The message was pivotal to the plot, but, for many of the students, it might as well have been written in a foreign language.

"They couldn't read the message," said Caruso, a teacher at West Hartford's Conard High School. "I had to back up the (film) and read it to them."

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, Web sites, instant messaging and other electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell and the fountain pen....

Who and What are We? (What the Abortion Debate is Really About) by Francis J. Beckwith @ TrueU.org (ht):

.... Abortion is an issue over which Americans are deeply divided, and there is little chance that this discord will be remedied anytime soon. Each side of this cultural divide consists of citizens sincere in their convictions. But the passions that fuel these convictions about abortion often distract us from understanding the issues that really divide us.

Now it may seem odd to say "the issues that really divide us," since it seems obvious to most people that what divides us is in fact only one issue, abortion. But that is misleading. After all, if abortion did not result in the death of an unborn human being, the controversy would either cease entirely or diminish significantly. So, what we disagree over is not really abortion. But rather, our disagreement is over the nature of the being whose life abortion terminates, the unborn....

Heart of Darkness: From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation. by Fouad Ajami @ OpinionJournal (ht):

The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.

Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence....

Oil Between A Rock And A Hard Place @ Investor's Business Daily:

Most fear-mongers are careful not to say we're running out of oil. They know they can't get away with it. Instead, they use words such as "crisis" and "peak oil" to insist that in about 30 years, little will remain.

Doomsayers who claim the world is running out of oil are not unique to our time. They've been around as long as oil has been used as an energy source.

As noted in a 1995 American Petroleum Institute paper, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers in 1855 to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from nature's laboratory."

Nineteen years later, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, which was then the nation's top oil-producing state, made a startling prediction. There was only enough oil left in the U.S., he said, to keep kerosene lamps burning for four years....

Anatomy of a Photograph by zombie @ zombietime.com:

An analysis of a single seemingly innocuous photograph, and the pervasive media bias it reveals....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 10/03/05 07:48:21 AM
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