I loved this job, especially the interaction with the readers. I admired the moral seriousness of their questions and the astuteness of their criticism — often fierce, occasionally discourteous, never sufficiently threatening to report to the police. But close. And that’s fine. Ethics is a subject about which honorable people may differ. I was less sanguine about readers who disparaged not my argument but my character or my shoes or my nose, attacks that generally concluded, “You should be ashamed.” I blame the anonymity of e-mail. And underprescribed medication.
...
These 12 years brought no radical shift in the sort of queries I received, unsurprisingly; real social change and its attendant moral uncertainty occur slowly. There have been sudden flurries of questions responding to newsworthy events. Immediately after 9/11, many people sent disheartening variations on a query that began, “My neighbor might be Pakistani . . . ,” and ended, “Should I call the F.B.I.?” Happily, such paranoia (with its maladroit crime-fighting tips) was ephemeral, in the column if not entirely in the larger world.

A more gradual and persistent change has been the emergence of queries sparked by the Internet. Some involved intellectual property: illegal music downloads, students’ failure to cite online sources. Others concerned evolving ideas of privacy, derived from experiences with Facebook and Google.

The image of Western liberal democracies is spreading and it is hard to deny the allure. Through a rich vein of Enlightenment thinking, they claim to represent a way of reconciling man’s natural autonomy with the subjection to authority that citizenship requires. In empowering people to have a say in the matters that affect them, many have come to view them as the panacea to a global economic market that systematically generates vast inequalities in living standards. ...

Yet this is not a true reflection of the logic which governs the global market. In opening up domestic economies to grave differences in bargaining power and leverage, it paves the way for rich transnational corporations from different parts of the world to exploit local workers. To argue by analogy, 17th century philosopher Giambattista Vico insisted that every law should be built upon the two pillars, the certum and the verum. There should be a tension between the certum, legal certainty – an ‘obscurity of judgement backed only by authority’ – and the verum, a higher standard of justice. Reducing the market to the sole pillar of science paves the way for reification, treating people as objects. Entire communities become mere statistics, in a move which robs them of their moral force and makes their rights much easier to disregard.

BP and other companies sued over the massive Gulf oil spill are asking a federal judge to dismiss many of the claims filed by businesses and people who say they have been harmed by the disaster.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier set Monday as a deadline for BP, Transocean and other companies to file motions to dismiss claims over last year’s deadly Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the spill that followed it.

Rig owner Transocean says many plaintiffs’ claims should be dismissed because they allegedly failed to follow the terms of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and filed suit before properly presenting their claims to BP.

For decades, the Wake County Public School System — the nation’s 18th largest — has been known as a strong academic district committed to integration.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, that meant racial integration.

In 2000, after courts ruled against using race-based criteria, Wake became one of the first districts in the nation to adopt a system of socioeconomic integration. The idea was that every school in the county (163 at present) would have a mix of children from poor to rich. The target for schools was a 60-40 mix — 60 percent of students who did not require subsidized lunches and 40 percent who did.

Then in 2009, a new conservative majority was elected to the Wake school board, and last spring it voted to dismantle the integration plan. Instead, families would be assigned to a school nearer their neighborhood. This meant a child who lived in a poor, black section of Raleigh would be more likely to go to a school full of poor black children, and a child living in a white, upper-middle-class suburb would be more likely go to a school full of upper-middle-class white children.

In most places that would have been it. Not here. This is a well-educated labor force (50 percent of employees are college graduates) that works in the high-tech Research Triangle and is predisposed to finding new ways to solve complex problems.

And that’s just what they set out to do. Two weeks ago, civic leaders here unveiled their proposal for a third generation of integration: integration by achievement. Under this plan, no school would have an overwhelming number of failing students. Instead a school might have a 70-30 mix — 70 percent of students who have scored proficient on state tests and 30 percent who are below grade level.

Dr Principe wants to rehabilitate alchemy. He believes that most alchemists were respectable seekers after knowledge and that they were working with well constructed (if ultimately misguided) theories. The reputation of the alchemists, he reckons, was deliberately undermined by gentleman amateurs who were trying to give the emerging science of chemistry the social respectability it needed to sit at the academic high table.

The work of Dr Principe, though, also serves as a useful reminder to modern scientists that even the most cherished theories need to be treated with constant scepticism. This is because, as the alchemists found out, it can be all too easy to see in your results what you want to see, rather than what is actually there.

Eric Alterman, February 24 piece at the Center for American Progress' website. 

For those who'd like to see more backup on whether there is class warfare going on in our country.

CAP has a reputation for being sort of the Democratic bullpen/government-in-waiting since John Podesta got it going a few years back.  I think it is interesting, and possibly significant, that CAP would permit someone to publish a piece at its website, sure to get a lot of attention in the blogosphere given Alterman's many tentacles, that uses the phrase "class war" in its title.  It might be tempting for some to see them as largely just the 2.0 version of the DLC in its approach to the union and class issues, even before the DLC went out of business.  But I think that was never true.  And it may be becoming less so by the day. 

Under the budget-repair bill passed by the Assembly on Friday, no bids would be required for the state to sell up to 37 heating and cooling plants across the state.

The bill would empower the secretary of the state Department of Administration to sell the plants, which primarily serve University of Wisconsin campuses, including those in Madison and Milwaukee, as well as state prisons and other facilities.

In a change from a similar proposal that Republican lawmakers sought six years ago, the bill stripped a requirement that the Public Service Commission review whether the sale is in the public interest.

During their marathon debate on the budget-repair bill, Democrats unsuccessfully sought changes to the plants issue, including a requirement that competitive bids be sought and another to restore PSC review of the deals.

By Mouin Rabbani, jadaliyya, February 26, 2011

....In contrast to Tunisia or Egypt, the Libyan people will not be required to engage in a further series of mass demonstrations against the new-old regime because there will be no one left to demonstrate against. Rather, the Libyan people will have a unique opportunity to speedily establish a new constitutional order and associated institutions that remove the security establishment from the apex of the power structure, and ram these down the generals’ throats.

The abiding weakness if not absence of Libyan institutions to mediate conflicts and prevent new divisions from turning violent of course also means it can all go horribly wrong. Nevertheless, there are reasonable causes for optimism....

On the other side of the ledger Libya is and will remain a rentier state, and such entities have a tradition of producing absolutism and the means to keep their populations quiescent. But that is precisely why the Libyan case is of such significance. It is not Syria or Morocco, but rather the “Kuwait” of the Maghreb....

The Grey Lady is up to something...many things and people are on the move over there, particularly with regard to the magazine.

The On Language column originated by William Safire has been cancelled.

Christoph Niemann's excellent Abstract City blog is closing down and the feature will move to the New York Times Magazine.

This is the last The Medium column by Virginia Heffernan.

After 12 years, Randy Cohen will no longer write The Ethicist column.

Deborah Solomon won't be doing those irritating interviews anymore.

Update: A couple I missed: Rob Walker's Consumed and Mark Bittman's The Minimalist are both ending. (thx, all)

By Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times, February 26, 2011

Rahm Emanuel’s jaw-dropping numbers in the African-American community gave him an undisputable win and raised the question: “How in the heck did he do it?”

After all, Mayor Daley got only 8 percent of the black vote when he first ran.

But last Tuesday, Emanuel racked up 59 percent of the black vote without the support of the city’s best-known black community organizers, politicians, clergy and civil rights leaders.

In an interview at his campaign headquarters on Friday, I asked the mayor-elect how he won over black Chicagoans.....

The devastation to the central city was especially brutal.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark, February 27:

"This is a city where the life has been squeezed out of it."