“Gay organizing is far from achieving its potential in some surprising areas of the country,” writes Doug Ireland in the Nation (July 12), describing Chicago as a “paradigm” for this failure. “The Second City’s mayor, Richie Daley, has managed to co-opt much of the gay community with a shrewd combination of patronage and symbolic gestures: The city has provided domestic partnership benefits to its employees since 1997, and as part of his citywide gentrification and urban renewal program, Daley spruced up Halsted Street, adorning it with gay rainbow markers.” Yeah, that sounds like a disaster.
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in the wake of the Chinese spy scandal, Los Alamos National Laboratory hid much of its Web site behind a fire wall to keep the public from seeing it. Among the things that disappeared was the lab’s “image map of the periodic table.”
“A few years ago I had an offer from a distinguished eastern university,” writes University of Chicago philosophy professor Daniel Garber (“University of Chicago Record,” May 27). “While I was considering what to do, I called a colleague here who had come to Chicago from there some years ago, and asked him about the difference between the University of Chicago and the other university, call it ‘X University.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at X, faculty figure that if you are there, then you must be the world expert in whatever it is that you teach. And so, you don’t have real conversations at X. One person talks, and the others listen respectfully until he finishes. But at Chicago, they have no respect: you are only as good as your last argument.’”
Virtual milestone you may have missed, reported in the July 20 Economist and reprinted in the July 29 “Progressive Review”: “The entire publicly traded American newspaper industry is now worth less than America Online.”
