January 22, 2012, 03:45 PM ET

The Passing of Joe Paterno, and Jewish Fathers

I don't know if the situation is comparable with gentile fathers, but this is how it works with elderly Jewish dads. They never voluntarily retire. Under any circumstances. Ever. If you ask them why, they will riposte with characteristic Hebraic forthrightness: "Because if I stop working I'll die, that's why. Schmuck." To which the Jewish Children of America—and I literally mean every single Member of the Tribe in the United States—will curse the intransigence of that generation and its illogical Old World ways. The passing of Penn State coach Joe Paterno, however, forces us to reevaluate the entire Florida/Arizona/Golden Years paradigm. If there is a labor studies professor or gerontologist reading this that has the relevant statistics, could he or she please answer this question: Is there a correlation between retiring and dying? Of course, Paterno didn't retire. He was... Read More

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January 22, 2012, 09:58 AM ET

Newt and the Unbearable Whiteness of the GOP

A friend joked about Rick Santorum's belated victory in Iowa: "Who cares that six more white people in Iowa voted for Santorum." Of course, Iowa is pretty darn white. Its population is 91-percent white. South Carolina is not. In fact its population is 66-percent white and 29-percent black. So how is it that 98 percent of the voters in the South Carolina GOP primary were white? Not to mention 98 percent of the voters were Christian (with 37 percent of those Catholics and 42 percent Protestant). According to Courtland Milloy over at The Washington Post, the unbearable whiteness of the GOP is not talked about enough given that

those who call themselves Republicans have coalesced around nothing more than their whiteness. What else could it be? Certainly not economic self-interest.

Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes

When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a "Food Stamp...

Transplant Rules Are Out of Touch With Reality

This post responds to my reader, Chuck Kleinhans, who asked for a follow-up to my previous post: Too Disabled For An Organ Transplant, which ran last week. Chuck wanted to know a little more about the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA). The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) was enacted in 1984. It is the first federal organ transplant law. Prior to that time, states organized their own organ transplant rules and they worked! The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) was enacted in all states, which means that states preserved their autonomy, but strove for consistency and uniformity with regard to organ transplant rules. The UAGA was first adopted in 1968 and was revised in 1987 in accordance with NOTA. In short, NOTA limits all contributions to the U.S. organ supply pool to organs that are altruistically supplied. In other words, it prohibits any "valuable... Read More

January 21, 2012, 11:00 PM ET

Quick Thoughts on South Carolina

Mitt Romney was thumped in the South Carolina primary tonight. This capped off a week of jittery debate performances, PR disasters (how many scholars reading this column are taxed at a rate of 15%?), and the puzzling inability to share his thoughts on Newt Gingrich's desire to be shared by the women in his life. Throughout this campaign I keep returning to (and abusing) the term "double down" and after tonight I understand why. As the South Carolina tally indicates, a significant portion of the GOP base is in full-fledged double-down mode. They don't want a boxer, they want a brawler--a wish predicated on a seething hatred of the policies of Barack Obama (and Barack Obama himself) that verges on the absurd. I noticed, incidentally, a very similar animus on campuses emanating from the radical Left during the George W. Bush years. Yet it was a decidedly fringe phenomenon--sorry Comp.... Read More

January 21, 2012, 12:15 PM ET

Monday's Poems: From Ye Chun's 'Map'

from Map 2. Gushui, Luoyang Green tea for night, red for day. The sun presses my temples as my father’s high bike draws another street to the east. The sparrow I caught with a basket, twig, rope and wheat shoots arrows at me with a slant eye. A tadpole between my sole and sandal. I’ve learned to hold a brush tight so the teacher behind my back can’t snatch it. The ink splashes on my stiff white shirt. White goat's hair black rabbit's hair yellow weasel's hair Master Fu Shan says: better ugly than charming better broken than sleek better natural than arranged This is a brush or a cut-off finger That is a character or a pried-out eye 8. Aransas Pass, Texas Your hair veins the setting sun. Love slashes in my body. If the world is a crystal glass and the dolphin its humming, why so much red? Shall we close our eyes and walk into the water of red sword... Read More

January 21, 2012, 11:28 AM ET

An Apology to Gilbert White

Your observation that 'the cuckoo does not deposit its egg indiscriminately in the nest of the first bird that comes in its way, but probably looks out a nurse in some degree congenerous, with whom to intrust its young,' is perfectly new to me; and struck me so forcibly, that I naturally fell into a train of thought that led me to consider whether the fact was so, and what reason there was for it. When I came to recollect and inquire, I could not find that any cuckoo had ever been seen in these parts, except in the nest of the wagtail, the hedge-sparrow, the titlark, the white-throat, and the red-breast, all soft-billed insectivorous birds…. This proceeding of the cuckoo, of dropping its eggs as it were by chance, is such a monstrous outrage on maternal affection, one of the first great dictates of nature, and such a violence on instinct, that, had it only been related of a bird in the...

Newt, Marriage, and the American Way

According to the most recent polls in South Carolina, Newt has weathered the storm of his second wife's bombshell that he asked her for an open marriage. And once again the importance of marriage in American political life has been brought into focus by the hypocrisy of those telling us about the importance of marriage in political life. Let us start at the beginning. First, all national politicians at this point in American history project the ideal family and the ideal marriage in order to win office. This is because many Americans believe that marriage is a sign of a highly disciplined and hard-working individual who can control their bodily impulses. This is why Bill Clinton was impeached—he was chubby and unfaithful. This is why George W. Bush seemed like such a good idea—he controlled his eating and kept his sexual impulses confined to the conjugal bed. It is paradoxical that ... Read More

January 21, 2012, 06:55 AM ET

The Problem(s) with Sex

Sex is a problem for evolutionary biologists, a very big problem. (Let’s be clear: we don’t personally have any more difficulty with it than does anyone else; it’s strictly a professional problem!) And here it is: By all rights, sex shouldn’t exist. Ask most non-biologists what sex is “for,” and they’d probably answer “reproduction,” but they’d be wrong. In fact, sex is quite simply a terrible way to reproduce. The reality is that living things can easily make babies without sex, and many do just that. Lots of animals breed asexually, via parthenogenesis (development of an unfertilized egg, without any involvement by males); the list includes many insects, crustaceans, rotifers, flatworms, snails, even some vertebrates including certain species of shark, lizard and the occasional bird. And it’s quite common in plants. The evolutionary conundrum is that... Read More

January 20, 2012, 01:46 PM ET

Too Disabled for an Organ Transplant?

Organ transplant politics are once again in the news. Most recently, a parent, Chrissy Rivera, alleged that Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has refused to perform a kidney transplant for her child. She claims that hospital officials turned down performing the transplant because staff referred to her child as “mentally retarded” and questioned the value of implanting the organ into a child with such severe mental and physical disabilities. According to her, hospital officials expressed concern about the quality of life benefit to the child as well as whether the family (and later the child) would have the means to sustain the medication regimen necessary to avoid organ rejection. Inherent in these concerns are financial consideration as anti-rejection medication costs can be exorbitant. The 3-year-old child, Amelia Rivera, was born with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, a rare genetic ... Read More

January 19, 2012, 02:09 PM ET

A Week in London

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. (Dr. Johnson to James Boswell, when the latter was contemplating a move to London.)

I fell in love with London during the long, hot summer of 1959. It was six months between leaving school, the second-best decision of my life, and going to university under the mistaken belief that I had the ability to do a degree in mathematics, the second-worst decision of my life. (Marrying Lizzie was the best decision and I am too much of a gentleman to say what was the worst but I will mention that I was married before.) Of all things, I got a job in the Camden Town Labour Exchange, signing people on the dole. I loved it. A rather naïve, sheltered eighteen-year old suddenly finds himself in a place... Read More