Last Saturday’s New York Times had a good editorial explaining why now would be a very good time to get rid of farm subsidies in the United States:
Published January 18, 2011
Category: Commentary
Published January 13, 2011
On “Chinese” Mothers (Updated)
Because my wife (and erstwhile coauthor) is Chinese-American, some people have asked me over the last few days what I thought of Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal piece last weekend trying to explain the superiority of Chinese mothers.
For the record, even though my wife and I were “parented” in (sometimes very) different ways, we more or less got to the same point, so I really have no particular insight about parenting, Chinese or otherwise.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t give any attention to what I see as Amy Chua’s all-too-obvious play to sell more books, but The Last Psychiatrist has a post that is too good not to link to about Chua’s piece.
The Last Psychiatrist’s point is that Amy Chua isn’t trying to raise children, she’s trying to raise children who will get into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Heaven forbid they should “only” get into Cornell or Duke.
The best parts of The Last Psychiatrist’s post are:
On Mark Bittman’s Future Food Manifesto (Updated)
A few weeks ago, the New York Times‘ Mark Bittman wrote a column entitled “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” in which he offered his thoughts as to how to “make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring.” Bittman’s suggestions are very much in line with the expectations and beliefs of the bien-pensant, as befits someone writing for the newspaper of record, but some of his suggestions were highly impractical.
I wanted to discuss his column earlier on but other more pressing events happened in terms of food policy which I chose to discuss first, and this has been a busy week, so my apologies for the lateness of these comments.
Among Bittman’s thoughts were: