What Bill Bennett Was Reading Before Getting On TV The Other Day

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal: "”I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ...”"

Good Advice On Doing Just About Anything

Sequential Tart: Redirected Male - Neil Kleid (vol V/iss 10/October 2002): "TIME: Comics aren't a race. No one is telling you your comic needs to be on the stands next week. Let's say you have a story idea, right? Now you need the time to write it. Okay � Brian Bendis has said on more than one occasion he writes while he's biking. He carries a pad with him and jots down ideas as he does his exercise. I do the same thing when I'm jogging. I write while I'm on the subway. I write when I'm in the bathroom. You find the time. Doing comics is a lot like school � you have to set time aside to do your homework. Schedule an hour. One hour of your day when no one bothers you, nothing distracts you. During that hour you set a goal � five pages of script, one page of pencils. There's no rush � you're not on DC Comics deadline here, right? Take it easy, do the best work you think you can.
Think about this � how much TV do you watch? How often do you find yourself sitting for hours in front of video games � be honest with yourself. I haven't watched TV in a while � maybe its 'cause there's nothing I like on, I dunno ... fact is, I'm worlds more productive without it. Look at your daily schedule, re-budget your day, and figure out what you can do to find that one hour to be productive. Again, this is no race.
But remember � you need to put the time in in order to get the work done. It's just not going to happen any other way."

Interview With Bin Laden

Independent Online Edition > Features : app3: "Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever - or, more to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of 'terrorism' gave no hint. "

Required Reading

After Life - New York Times: "I had been asked before I left the hospital if I would authorize an autopsy. I had said yes. I later read that asking a survivor to authorize an autopsy is seen in hospitals as delicate, sensitive, often the most difficult of the routine steps that follow a death. Doctors themselves, according to many studies (for example, Katz, J., and Gardner, R., 'The Intern's Dilemma: The Request for Autopsy Consent,' Psychiatry in Medicine 3:197203, 1972), experience considerable anxiety about making the request. They know that autopsy is essential to the learning and teaching of medicine, but they also know that the procedure touches a primitive dread. If whoever it was at New York Hospital who asked me to authorize an autopsy experienced such anxiety, I could have spared him or her: I actively wanted an autopsy. I actively wanted an autopsy even though I had seen some, in the course of doing research. I knew exactly what occurred, the chest open like a chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale on which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it (I had watched those other autopsies with John, I owed him his own, it was fixed in my mind at that moment that he would be in the room if I were on the table), but I did not trust myself to rationally present the point so I did not ask."

Can I Get An AMEN?

DESIREE COOPER: Parents raising kids to be wimps: "What has spawned a generation of hyper-protective parents? Marano said she believes that the professional approach to parenting has been part of the problem. With so much information about how to be a good parent, there's pressure to do it right."

WSJ.com - Thanks for Nothing

WSJ.com - Thanks for Nothing: "Book acknowledgments can provide a moment of glory for otherwise anonymous minions: The authors of a just-released thriller thank a hairdresser and their maid. But in many cases, writers strategically use acknowledgments to burnish their own image or further their careers -- which can be easy to do, because acknowledgments, unlike virtually all other elements of a book, aren't fact-checked and sometimes not even edited. 'There is a weird, perhaps subconscious, name-dropping going on,' says Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins. 'Some writers are almost being competitive, dropping as many upmarket literary names as possible to prove their pedigree.'"

Well Well....

BRIAN DICKERSON: Admitting he has a problem: "The 'persistent poverty' exposed by Katrina, the president said in a speech broadcast live from the eerily illuminated lawn of New Orleans' St. Louis Cathedral, 'has roots in a history of racial segregation, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.'
The next day, speaking at a National Cathedral memorial service for Katrina's victims, he again alluded to the continuing economic impact of past discrimination and called on Congress to seize the opportunity presented by the gulf coast's devastation and reconstruction.
'As we clear away the debris of a hurricane,' Bush said, 'let us also clear away the legacy of inequality.'"

Scientific American Article from October 2001

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Drowning New Orleans -- [ CIVIL ENGINEERING ] -- A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically: "The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. 'As the water recedes,' says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, 'we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.' "

There may be hope for me yet...

DESIREE COOPER: A new way to conceive work: "Potters, to your wheels! Writers, to the page! Painters, to the canvas! Your Golden Age has arrived.
At least that's the theory that Pink proffers in his new book, 'A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.'"