by A.G. Sulzberger, in The New York Times
Frustrated by what he has characterized as continued obstructionism by the Bloomberg administration, a federal judge on Wednesday appointed Robert M. Morgenthau as a special master who will oversee the city’s implementation of practices aimed at increasing the number of black and Hispanic firefighters.
The appointment of Mr. Morgenthau, who recently stepped down as district attorney of Manhattan after 35 years in office, can be seen as an effort by the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, to choose someone with the stature and will to tussle with city leaders.
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Reviewed by Theodore Dalrymple, in The Globe and Mail
All men are created equal, perhaps, but they do not by any means lead lives of equal interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is still only in her later 30s, has already ensured her place in history and is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable people in the world.
Her linguistic abilities alone would be more than enough to satisfy most people: Having learned Somali (her native tongue), English, Amharic, Arabic and Swahili, she learned Dutch sufficiently well in a couple of years to be able to stand for the Dutch parliament. But, of course, it is her public and uncompromising repudiation of Islam for which she is best known.
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By Shikha Dalmia, in Forbes
Secularism does not justify eliminating women’s clothing choices.
Having grown up in a traditional Hindu family in India, I understand something about the domestic pressure for public modesty on girls. Jeans came into vogue just when I hit puberty. But for years the only way I could step out of the house in them without risking a minor nuclear explosion by my dad–a fairly urbanized doctor–was if I slipped on a blouse loose enough to smother my front and long enough to conceal my behind. A bathing suit–much less a bikini like the one that the first Muslim Miss USA wore to victory this week–was out of the question. Hence I never learned to swim.
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From Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books:
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
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By Avi Zenilman, in Vanity Fair Daily
The two finalists at last night’s Miss U.S.A. competition opened up a whole new set of avenues for empty political chatter.
Miss Oklahoma, Morgan Elizabeth Woolard, is for the Arizona immigration law. She really likes “states’ rights,” but she is against racial profiling.
On the other hand, Miss Michigan, Rima Fakih, is a Muslim. She won the whole event. According to Daniel Pipes, a former Giuliani adviser, her victory is a sign of affirmative action—the bad kind of racial profiling?—run amok. (Or maybe it’s a sign that you shouldn’t tout states’ rights once you’ve already won the right to represent your state.)
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From Colin Marshall, in 3 Quarks Daily
So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.
Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?
Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It’s quite a while back, so I wasn’t really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that’s much more universal than the story being just a Korean story.
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Disability Ethics: A Framework for Practitioners, Professionals and Policy Makers by Paul Jewell is now available from the On Diversity imprint.
The social arrangements with which we are familiar work fairly well for most of us most of the time. We work, we earn, we pay taxes. We engage professionals when we need their advice. We expect that there will be doctors whose expertise can be relied upon if we are ill, that there will be schools staffed with knowledgeable teachers and courts presided over by fair judges. We vote for politicians who offer policies we favour. We require government to provide us with security, protect our freedom and assist those of us who cannot help themselves.
These social arrangements rest on some shared assumptions and values. They assume that people are, by and large, free, self-determining persons who respect each other’s rights and independence, and co-operate rationally and productively with each other. Our social arrangements are challenged when this assumption does not hold. What policies should government have in place for people who are not independent, or not rational, or not co-operative, or not productive? If, by some catastrophe, through accident, disability or mental illness, you became such a person, how should you be dealt with by professionals and government services? If, on the other hand, you are a professional, how should you go about making decisions for clients who are not well placed to make decisions for themselves? Are there standards of professional ethics that can deal with this situation? Are there ethical standards that can be applied by managers of service organizations, or by policy writers, or by government officials? Are there ethical standards that concerned citizens should demand of government, of service organizations and of professionals who provide for vulnerable people?
Drawing on the stories of people with disabilities and their service providers, Paul Jewell explores ethical theories, tests their practical application, and offers strategies essential to practitioners, managers, policy-makers and professionals who provide services to people with disabilities.
By Katie Roiphe, in Financial Times
For a long time people have been trying to define the American woman, mostly for the purpose of mocking, dismissing or putting her in her place.
“There is no such thing as ‘the fast girl’ in America,” says one of Henry James’s Englishmen, meaning, of course, that all American girls are fast – and this is more or less the view of an ambitious new Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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From The Australian