Playwright Arthur Miller dead at 89 Friday, February 11, 2005 Posted: 10:47 AM EST (1547 GMT) ROXBURY, Connecticut (AP) — Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died, his assistant said Friday. He was 89. Story

I’ve offered up any number of dire pronouncements about the present and future of journalism in America in recent months, but this latest one (thanks to SBU J/MC colleague Pat Vecchio for pointing me toward it) takes the proverbial cake: the Durham Herald-Sun has fired a reporter for the anonymous exercise of free speech. This post, like all entries in

Item: One popular PR yearbook estimates that news releases influence as much as 80 percent of the news. Item: Other studies show that up to half or more of the content in publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal originate from press releases or PR story suggestions. Dr. Michael Turney of Northern Kentucky U adds

I want to applaud the Carolina fans on for the grace with which they are dealing with last night’s defeat. One Carolina fan I correspond with has continued nonstop with the stream of excusemongering he began early yesterday – literally hours before the game even started. So far he has blamed just about everybody short of the Trilateral Commission for

It will be interesting to see how they go about ignoring this one. The NFR team on this one includes a Pulitzer winner, so this challenge is well above partisan hackery… According to several credible reports, “Mr. Gannon” has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon

A recent NY Times editorial makes a sensible argument for the importance of teacher training in the ongoing challenge to fix America’s badly broken school systems.

Here’s a very worthwhile read on where the Churchill case appears to be going from ksol1460, nicked from ….

I just had a student tell me that after my class he felt like he needed to go to church. This class was all about Christian Millennarian theologists, too. So I must be doing something right, huh?

krautboy is my new hero, and thanks to fikshun for passing along these pix of the worst-dressed nerds in Star Wars con history. Seriously, if you’re going to be a nerd, at least be a good nerd.

Bob Herbert is dead on the money here, and to his analysis I would add that this is not a partisan issue. What Bush is doing is not only incompatible with traditional American conservative principles, it is the precise opposite of what Republican conservatives have stood for as long as there has been a Republican party. What would the American

Disclaimer #1: This is neither a defense nor condemnation of CU Professor Ward Churchill or the essay which has sparked the current hellstorm in Boulder. It is instead a reaction to the reaction, a comment on how the issue is being received and handled. I may eventually undertake a blow-by-blow analysis of what Churchill has to say, but for moment

[Thanks for Jay DeFrank for passing this on.] Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, has a new article in Technology Review arguing that Darwinian evolution has ended and been replaced by “cultural evolution.” Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to

1: Well, the Deacs held off Duke in a game that got way too exciting for my taste down the stretch. Wake had it in the bag up until the last two or three minutes, when they apparently decided they’d played enough defense for the evening and that there was no real reason to execute on the offensive end since

drdenny sure has hit the ground running. Today’s entry does a nice job examining one more element of the kleptocracy…..

This little quotable hit my box this morning, courtesy of the pit’s Rocket Science Editor, Dr. Mike Pecaut: “People are always willing to pay far more for entertainment than they are for science, and yet they place far far greater demands on science than they ever do on entertainment.” That sounds about right.