Scrapbook
Scrapbook Allons, Enfants! The French, always on guard for infections of Englishism on their precious corps culturel, have suffered another blow. An international study of basic literacy,...
...The French now wrap their arms around the "culture bias" critique of unwelcome standardized test results, a peculiarly American export if ever there were one...
...Sadder and wiser after his acquittal, Phineas is at last ready to make a wonderful marriage to Mme...
...But the Anglo-Saxons get the last laugh...
...In addition, in a letter Harvard is sending out in response to inquiries from disgruntled alumni and others, Shepsle assures one and all that "we do not have separate admissions processes for minorities and non-minorities" and that he wants the admissions committee to "focus on intellectual merit...
...Yes, employees the world over like to do that...
...Corruption in Washington?Where...
...21 memorandum from Harvard University's government department chairman, Kenneth Shepsle, that attempts to answer questions about the department's use of quotas in admissions that were originally raised in Elena Neuman's Oct...
...but they don't ask their fellow citizens to pay for it...
...The story demonstrated how the government department used a two-track system for admitting students and granting financial aid, and has understandably caused a firestorm in Cambridge...
...Continued the Cork-meister, "I think at the end of the day it's okay if we have dinner and get together...
...11 issue) who will scream if there is any public retreat from the "affirmative-action" regime described in Neuman's article...
...And come to think of it, Disney World is a "national park" that is none the worse for being outside the control of the National Park Service...
...The gang reportedly unwound at Sea World, and was treated to backstage tours of the Magic Kingdom...
...4 after admitting he received $654 million from businessmen to create a political slush fund...
...The Reading List The Reading List again hangs its head in shame...
...The ostensible purpose of the junket was a (week-long) "training workshop...
...federal government still seems orders of magnitude less corrupt than just about anywhere else...
...Actually, many taxpayers would settle for, oh, five hours...
...But, according to the Associated Press, the sixth-grade students in the audience "became distracted when one of them threw up during the speech...
...How so...
...Every ?colier knows that...
...In the first place, Boot of the Beast appears only in Waugh's Scoop...
...A correction in last week's issue contained a doozy of a mistake itself: It is not true, as we said, that in the last paragraph of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief, the hapless newspaperman Boot of the Beast gets cannibalized...
...Max Goesler, the Jewish widow whom Shirley Robin Letwin describes as the "ideal gentleman" in her seminal study, The Gentleman in Trollope...
...David Durenberger's recent sentence of one year's probation for submitting $3,825 in phony expenses to the Senate, to a few that have recently ensnared politicians around the world...
...An international study of basic literacy, conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, has ranked France last among seven Western industrialized countries-barely ahead of Poland...
...That's what the French Education Ministry has done...
...6 announcement that a special counsel would begin examining whether House Speaker Newt Gingrich breached the tax code when he used tax-deductible contributions to underwrite his teaching of a college class...
...In Phineas Redux, the idealistic young Irish member of Parliament we met in Phineas Finn finds himself accused of murder, all because he was wearing the same kind of raincoat as the true murderer and is fingered for the crime by the thick Lord Fawn...
...Though Trollope does not usually reach such heights, the grandeur of Crawley's weakness makes him a towering literary figure...
...More than 40 percent of France's adult population scored in the lowest level of reading proficiency, a figure twice as bad as that for-zut alors!-the United States...
...The reading tests in question, says Ministry official Claude Th?lot, were spoiled by "Anglo-Saxon culture...
...Notwithstanding the howling by Perotistas that Washington is awash in special-interest money, the U.S...
...The grand prize for dipping into the national kitty goes to the president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, who during his 30-year tenure is estimated to have enriched himself to the tune of $5 billion, though as far as we know he has never been examined by a special counsel...
...In honor of this week's editorial about Newt Gingrich and the unfair charges against him, we recommend two books by one of the Reading List's favorite authors, Anthony Trollope, who wrote masterfully about the experience of being charged with an offense that the accused did not commit...
...If ever there was evidence that the United States is hypersensitive to political corruption, it came with the Dec...
...If you make a mistake of one egg, your cake may not be spoiled...
...Raul Salinas, the brother of the former president of Mexico, is in prison on murder charges and now faces questions about an $84 million bank account he maintained in Switzerland...
...And it is Basil Seal's fianc?e, Prudence, who is made into a human stew that Basil actually ingests in the last paragraph of the book...
...Phineas Redux is the fifth book in Trollope's six-novel Palliser cycle, which together surely make up the best British novel about politics and Parliament...
...Shepsle's memo assures all concerned that the department's admissions process is "merit-based" and minimizes the extent to which "diversity" considerations come into play...
...Touch...
...Said Corky Mayo, "chief of interpretation and education" for the National Park Service, "People expect government workers to work 24 hours a day...
...Harvard Hates Us The Weekly Standard has obtained a Nov...
...French people don't learn this way, sniffs M. Th?lot...
...One exercise outlined the egg recipe for a four-person cake and then asked how many eggs would be required to feed six...
...9 cover story, "Harvard's Sins of Admission...
...The Last Chronicle of Barset may be Trollope's greatest work, the stunning and sobering portrait of the impoverished clergyman Josiah Crawley and how his pride makes it impossible for him to defend himself adequately when he is accused of theft...
...Gag Me With a Candidate Democratic Rep...
...Simple: Reject the study and order all references to France expunged...
...Fun With Federal Workers Aweek after last month's government shutdown, 200-some federal workers flew at public expense to Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World...
...All thanks and apologies to Michael Kelly of Washington, D.C., Terence E. Ryan of Danbury, Ct., and Jerry Brown of Potomac, Md., who caught us out in the postmodernist act of committing an error in the course of apologizing for a previous error...
...the English protagonist of Black Mischief is none other than the classic Waughian reprobate, Basil Seal...
...Now compare the Gingrich troubles and other Washington scandals, including former Sen...
...This means either that Harvard is blowing smoke, or that the government department has in fact changed its admissions procedures, but is unwilling officially to acknowledge doing so for fear of antagonizing all of those (like the graduate students "of color" whose letter was published in the Dec...
...Then there's the former president of South Korea, Roh Tae Woo, who was indicted on Dec...
...Robert Torricelli of New Jersey inaugurated his campaign for the Senate seat being vacated by Bill Bradley at an elementary school in his home town...
...What's a proud Frenchman to do...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 15
