Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 8 Editor's Choice: 3
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Smile when you say that
[Read the article: Three words you should never say to Bjork]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obviously the syllables in the greeting "Welcome to bangkok" mean something extremely insulting in Icelandic -- perhaps "You are smaller than even our child prostitutes" or "I liked you much better when you were with the Sugarcubes."
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Tell us something we don't know
[Read the article: Big Pharma's funny numbers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know how long you researched this, but I wish you had taken longer and come up with some real conclusions. As it is, you seem to be hoping that one of your readers will look at this and run with it, do their own research, and publish a more substantial story with real facts and conclusions. All this does is illustrate the limitations of journalism being squeezed into a blog.
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What have we learned?
[Read the article: Making love across generations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I see that Marlowe is also the author of a memoir about heroin addiction. As we should have learned by now from the James Frey, there's one thing to keep in mind when reading a memoir written by an addict: addicts always lie.
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Pathos in Detroit
[Read the article: Hooray, Celexa took my sex drive away!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That is one of the saddest things ever -- a guy who's glad an anti-depressant took his libido away. If he's this pathetic now, imagine what he was like before he started taking the drug.
Dude, you live in Detroit -- how could you not be depressed?
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Yes, a failure -- but a first class one!
[Read the article: How Opal Mehta saved our lives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sandip Roy's piece has the theme "... relief that finally we can fail, that we can screw up spectacularly and live to tell the tale."
First of all, the jury is still out on whether Kaavya will "live to tell the tale" -- after all, Harvard has not yet decided whether it will discipline her, as it has other plagarists.
More importantly, Roy seems to be saying that high-achieving immigrants need role-models in failure as well as success. Taken this way, Kaavya Viswanathan is still an over-achiever. Her book was pulled from distribution, her publisher has cancelled her contract, and people are still discovering "similarities" between her book and others. Just about everything has happened to her except a public spanking on Oprah. A more spectacular flame-out can hardly be imagined.
I have the feeling that the writer's relief has less to do with finally having a role model for failure and more to do with the sense that she got caught -- not the writer. Not that Sandip Roy can be accused of anything underhanded -- but who among us has not harbored a secret fear that our faults and screw-ups will be exposed in the harsh light of day, and relief when it happens not to us, but to someone else?
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Still as superior as ever
[Read the article: Lost faith in the GOP]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As a liberal Christian, I tend to cringe at a lot of talk by evangelicals, even more because of the smugness and superiority they betray than their politics. Cizik's statements show that, despite being somewhat agog at their abandonment by the Republican Party, evangelicals continue to insist only their way is correct. Rather than look for common ground with others, they insist the mountain come to them. "We don't need to go like supplicants to the political parties. We say, consider what our agenda is and join us." So much for the respectful discussion and compromise which is at the root of representative democracy.
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More Sunita, less diapered psychos
[Read the article: Love triangle in space!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sunita Williams rocks for being a fantastic role model in many ways. I wish one-tenth of the attention paid to this psycho love story had been given her achievement -- less the spacewalk record itself than being an Indian-American woman who has reached the pinnacle of her profession.
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We should retire the phrase "needs to"
[Read the article: Geraldine Ferraro still needs to apologize]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Without even reading this article or even responding to its thesis, I was irked by the headline. Where did this phrase "needs to" come from? Other than being more pretentious and presumptuous -- can anyone really says what another person "needs to do"? -- does it mean anything other than "should"?