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Links Quel Blog, the blog of John Pierce
Book and Music Page, johnrpierce.com
E-mail: john @ johnrpierce.info |
May 23, 2003
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum, "is not primarily (as its subtitle says) a defense of drug use. It is, rather, a critique of anti-drug propaganda and a plea for reason. Sullum, a scholar on drug policy and an editor for Reason magazine, argues that there is a 'silent majority' of drug users who smoke pot, snort cocaine, even shoot smack without losing their lives, jobs, or families. They stay quiet, because if they spoke up they would be ridiculed, fired (in 2000, two-thirds of big companies drug-tested), or arrested."--from a book review by Joshua Wolf Shenk in Mother Jones of June 2003. The reviewer describes the book as "deft, judicious, and thorough."
I do not advocate the use of any of the drugs that are now illegal, and would not do so even if they were legalized. But I do have serious doubts about the wisdom of treating drug users as criminals.
May 19, 2003
Slightly under 79 percent of the students who applied for admission to Harvard College's undergraduate class of 2007 have chosen to enroll, reports the Harvard University Gazette of May 15, 2003. "Harvard's yield remains, by a substantial margin, the highest of the nation's selective colleges--particularly striking because students admitted under Harvard's Early Action program are free to enroll at other colleges."
May 18, 2003 "All in all, the author has created a meticulously annotated, highly readable, and engrossing work," wrote Kathleen Kerwin in Business Week of May 26, 2003, about Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress by Douglas Brinkley. "Central to the company's tale is the enigma that is Henry Ford, to whom Brinkley devotes roughly 500 of his 858 pages." May 16, 2003 This morning I am not able to gain access to my yahoo e-mail or groups.
Richard Morrison of The Times says that he came "out of Angelika Kirchschlager’s concert of Bach arias with the Venice Baroque Orchestra [at the Barbican in London] feeling as one sometimes does after consuming a Chinese take-away: intermittently pleasured but substantially unsatisfied."
April 8, 2003
In the case of BMW of North America v. Gore, 116 S. Ct. 1589 (1996) the United States Supreme Court held that there are constitutional limits on punitive damages. This week, on Monday April 7, the United States Supreme Court decided another case involving punitive damages, State Farm v. Campbell. “The Supreme Court . . . declared lopsided punitive damages unconstitutional if they exceeded nine times actual losses and struck down a Utah award of $145 million on a $1 million verdict,” reported the Washington Post in an article at http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030408-360699.htm
April 3, 2003 "For the first time, a total of more than 20,000 students applied [to Harvard] for undergraduate admission, making the Class of 2007 the most competitive in Harvard's history. The 2,056 admitted students were selected from a pool of 20,986, an admission rate of 9.8 percent."--from the Harvard University Gazette of April 3, 2003.
New pages--May 2003
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