Stop the massacres? Yes, we could do that -- but the people doing the killing would still be there, and would no doubt resume once we left.

Kill off the entire Arab population of the region? Well, we could probably do that too -- but that's called genocide, and you know, we didn't start building death camps for Germans after WW2, no matter how much we might have felt like their actions justified it at the time.

Overthrow the Sudanese government and try to install hand-picked puppets who, hopefully, will use their authority (whatever they have of it) to rein in the janjaweed? Right, because as recent experience has shown us, that always works out so well.

What's happening in Darfur is grotesque, no doubt about it. And if we hadn't sunk ourselves neck-deep in the quagmire of Iraq, we might actually have the moral authority and military and diplomatic power to do something about it. Now ... it's too late. It's just too late.

I think these are two different phenomena. Authors at more obscure universities publishing papers in collaboration with those at more famous universities is wholly a Good Thing: it gives the first group more exposure, and helps keep the second group falling prey to ivory tower syndrome. Intellectual incest, to which Ivies and other top-name schools are just as vulnerable as Podunk U., is less likely in the atmosphere of free exchange of ideas which universities have always promised but which the internet makes truly possible for the first time.

But peer review isn't going away, or at least it shouldn't. Working in the hard sciences, I'm a big fan of the way the pre-press phenomenon has taken off at places like arXiv.org -- but I know perfectly well that the papers appearing there aren't as reliable as those appearing in peer-reviewed journals. Any researcher, in any field, with the best of intentions, can get carried away and start spouting nonsense. Peer review is still the best method of reality checking anyone's ever found.

Where the internet is really changing the academic publishing world is in the growth of open access journals. High-quality open access journals like those from PLoS and BMC deliver peer-reviewed material much faster than paper journals, and they're available to everyone. And in only a couple of years, I've seen the attitude of paper journal publishers go from "Internet publication will never be as good as 'real' publication" to "We'd better figure out how to make open access work with our current business model, and quick." The end result is good for the journal publishers, good for academics, and good for the general public.

Currently, the letters system allows readers to decide the order in which they read the letters (oldest to newest or vice versa) and whether they want to see all letters or only Editor's Choices. How about a third option: whether or not to display anonymous letters? That way, if we want to read the weird rants by right-wingers who no more have the guts to sign their names than they do to go fight in George III's war, we can (sometimes they're entertaining in their own car-crash-can't-look-away fashion) but mostly we can just filter them out.

Target, "bitch" is often applied to men in the straight world; of course, its power comes from the idea that feminizing a man is a vile insult. Same thing with "pussy." It's particularly used by men who like to think of themselves as straight but say things to other men like, "In prison, you'd be my bitch." Personally, I think guys like that have some ... issues ... but that's neither here nor there.

As far as other animal comparisons go, "pig" and "ape" are almost exclusively applied to men. I agree that neither of these has the power that "bitch" does.

Anyway ... it's absurd. You can't make these words go away by banning them; the only way to make them be used (or used in that way, at least) less often is by the far harder work of changing society, and that's not something the NYC city council is going to accomplish on its own. It is very, very rare these days to hear "nigger" used as an actual insult; yeah, as a white person I cringe when I hear black people calling each other that, but I know it's not meant the way it would be if a KKK'er said it. (The one time I was addressd that way, by a black person, I wasn't quite sure what to say, so I just let it slide.) The last time anyone called me "kike" was 20+ years ago, and even then it seemed too anachronistic to be seriously insulting -- and no one can deny that there was a time, well within living memory, when that was a very powerful word indeed! I still hear "spic" and "gook" occasionally, but not often.

Why is this? It's not because the words have gone away. It's because we as a society have decided that open displays of racism are no longer acceptable; if we can do the same for sexism, great, but stupid word bans aren't the way to do it. There are a lot of racial and ethnic insults you just won't hear anymore at all -- when was the last time you heard someone called "jigaboo" or "wop" or "mick" as anything but a joke? -- and we can hope that "bitch" (except as a word for a fertile female dog, I mean) and "ho" will one of these days sound just as archaic.