2 smooth operators in love
The couple met in December 1999, at a bar, Double Happiness, in Lower Manhattan. Each had arrived with separate groups of friends, and when one of his friends disappeared, Mr. Berger approached Ms. Lusk.
"Have you seen my friend?" he asked.
"No," she responded.
"Would you like to be my new friend?" he wondered.
Ms. Lusk said she appreciated Mr. Berger's "pretty good attempt to start talking to me," and their first conversation was born. Mr. Berger had begun telling his new friend that he was a Democrat and was involved in volunteer work for the presidential campaign. He quickly learned that she was a Republican.
Their conversation was soon interrupted by Ms. Lusk's friends, who pulled her aside and said they wanted to leave. Ms. Lusk offered Mr. Berger a parting shot: "I have two pieces of bad news," she said. "I'm leaving, and Al Gore's losing."
- new york times June 19, 2005
military recruiting made easier with No Child Left Behind
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had more power.
"With the draft, there were limited opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped, reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. [...]
Col. David Slotwinski, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting, said that the Army faced an uphill battle because many baby boomer parents are inclined to view military service negatively, especially during a controversial war.
"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Colonel Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."
- damien cave, "Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents," new york times june 3, 2005
posted June 03, 2005 in politicsnow i read boston publications, sort of
the next series installment, on marriage and class, completely neglects the subject’s most historically significant recent development: how more affluent mates postpone marriage and childrearing through what’s known euphemistically as "assortative mating" (i.e., the sort of closely vetted, intraclass pairings of the privileged featured every week in the Vows section of the Times), versus the considerable pressures within poor communities to marry early and procreate often. Instead, the main dispatch by Times reporter Tamar Lewin sets up elaborate social quandaries better suited to a Victorian novel than to 21st-century American life. It describes the course of a second marriage for both partners that’s taken them beyond the reach of their familiar social stations: wife Cate Woolner is a rich heiress, husband Dan Croteau is a working-class car salesman. It’s hard to suss out just what the social lesson of such a plainly atypical union is supposed to be. Apart, that is, from the manifest truth that, left to their own devices, the rich will always raise the most irritating children on earth ("[Woolner’s son] Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance space, traveling through South America, or operating a sunset massage cruise on the Caribbean").
- CHRIS LEHMANN, "All classed up and nowhere to go: The New York Times goes slumming: How the paper’s allegiance to the ruling elite distorts its look at class in America," boston phoenix june , 2005
posted June 03, 2005 in print