Silver Bowl

Obviously, it is possible to distinguish among different categories of rapes: rape accomplished by overt or overtly threatened violence, 'date rape,' statutory rape. But the Republicans’ concern for such distinctions—their fascination with 'parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about,' as President Obama put it—does not stem from empathy for the suffering of the victims, or any attempt to understand the varieties of trauma. It stems from a determination to force as many pregnant women as possible to carry their pregnancies to term.

Did it not occur to him or did no one dare tell him or did he simply dismiss any suggestion that it’s not a good idea to enter presidential-level politics with money stashed away in a Swiss bank account and on the Cayman Islands?

She’s a 16-year-old who got up from the kind of shocking, public, humiliating disappointment that few of us can even imagine, and, with every camera in the world trained on her face, couldn’t plaster on a fake smile. That doesn’t make her a sore loser. It makes her real and human. No forgiveness required.

Congressman takes Onion article at face value.

If you curl into a U shape at the top of your leap, as high jumpers and pole vaulters do, you will be able to clear a bar while your center of gravity passes underneath it. The curvier you become, the greater the height you can achieve. In the 1968 Games, in Mexico City, the American high jumper Dick Fosbury won the gold medal by flipping himself over the bar head first and backward—a technique now known as the Fosbury Flop. He set an Olympic record, which made it a lot easier for people to forget that his leap looked like something out of the Ministry of Silly Jumps, and now every high jumper does it.

At the outset of Obama's administration, the political right [meaning Senator Mitch McConnell] literally said, out loud: 'The No1 project of this party is to make sure that this guy – this guy – only serves one term.' How do you make sure of that? You don't allow him to do anything good or worthwhile. Every chance you get, block him, and that's what they've done. Which now allows them to say: 'He's failed, he can't get anything done.' If he loses, it simply proves what you always feared, that democracy can be bought, and that the country is owned by the rich. And if everything gets bought, how do we ever get the country back?

Contemporary American parents [...] tend to take a highly expansive view of their kids’ abilities. Little Ben may not be able to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown.

At first, I assumed that Binet was aware of both kinds of contradiction, and was playing a very deep game, in which the novel's narrator is not identical with the author, and is only partly conscious of his own 'cheap literary effects.' But, in an interview with the Guardian, Binet emphatically declares that he is identical with the narrator, and that he always hated being told by schoolteachers to separate author and narrator.

Locke and Montesquieu are not exactly household names there yet.

'I’m always angry,' [Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner (the Hulk)] says at one point, and while 'The Avengers' is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre. Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe. Some of the rebel spirit of Mr. Whedon’s early projects 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' creeps in around the edges but as detail and decoration rather than as the animating ethos. 'I aim to misbehave,' Malcolm Reynolds famously said in 'Serenity.' But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and 'The Avengers,' which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.

But Ryan will have none of this [following historical precedent in the U.S. by cutting the defense budget on account the ending of a major war]. And, despite his rhetorical obsession with 'efficiency' elsewhere, he doesn’t even offer a substantive justification for why defense should get a free pass, or why national security requires us to spend four hundred billion dollars more each year than we did a decade ago. Instead, he relies on overblown rhetoric—cuts would 'devastate' the military—and bad historical analogies. He argues that defense spending is smaller—as a percentage of G.D.P., and as a percentage of federal spending—than its Cold War average. That comparison makes no sense: we are no longer facing the might of the Soviet Union, and the major threats of today are not ones that new aircraft carriers and joint strike fighters are designed to combat.

Ultimately, the public policy question is why the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call ‘higher education?’ Why do states subsidize the institutions that are responsible for this decline, rather than directly supporting a modest number of serious, hard-working and financially needy students? Why is higher education so dysfunctional, and becoming more so daily? When is the bubble going to burst? Run; do not walk, to the store to get this book.