Bret Stephens:

It’s a safe bet that 100 years from now most half-way educated people will know about Neil Armstrong. It’s also a safe bet that in a century the name Michael Jackson will be familiar only to five or six cultural anthropologists and, possibly, a medical historian. So what does it say about the United States in 2009 that the late moon-walker is a household name but the living one is not? . . . much of what made the Apollo missions such a tribute to America was the character of the astronauts: their clipped exchanges between Houston and the spacemen; or Lovell, Anders and Borman reading from Genesis on Apollo 8; or the unflappable Flight Director Gene Kranz working the problems of Apollo 13 to triumph.

He contrasts these thoughts with what is promoted in celebrity culture. (HT: Big Hollywood)

Sol Stern writes about teachers in New York and seven practical ways school administrators and teachers unions can educate their students better.

I first discovered how teachers’ contracts can undermine excellence when my two children attended P.S. 87, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in the 1990s. After dropping the kids off one morning, I noticed a disheveled, middle-aged man shuffling aimlessly around the schoolyard as the children waited for their teachers to bring them inside. He seemed in a stupor; I worried that a homeless person had wandered onto the school grounds. When I pointed him out to a fellow parent, she giggled and explained that he was a new teacher.

That can’t be true, I thought, and went off to see the principal, who briefed me about the seniority transfer clause in the teachers’ contract. Among all the applicants for a posted vacancy at P.S. 87, our obviously impaired new teacher had the most years in the system, so he automatically got the job. The teacher’s former principal, wanting to get rid of him, gave him a satisfactory rating and encouraged him to change schools—a practice known as “passing on the lemons.” P.S. 87’s principal didn’t even have the right to interview the transfer teacher before he showed up for the first day of school.

How were the stones at Stonehenge transported and set up? A construction worker thinks he knows how. (Thanks to Uncle Orvis for the link.)

Steve Carper, in the Writer’s Bloc column of this month’s Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, quotes The New York Times, quoting Richard Dawkins, who has a low opinion of fantasy:

Dawkins said, “I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic things turning into other things—it is unscientific, I think it is anti-scientific. Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

His book for children is to explore children’s relationships with fairy tales and to encourage them to think about the world scientifically rather than mythologically.

Atheists keep telling us that they live full and meaningful lives without God, but they keep coming up with sterile nonsense like this. And then they wonder why we’re repelled by their arguments.



“I am proud to announce that I have proven shoes unnecessary!” said the scientist, after cutting off both his feet.

Guardian writers Sarah Crown and John Crace offer advice on how to arrange one’s shelf of books, for instance: “The kleptomaniac: Easy. You just arrange your books in accordance with the numbering system of the library from which you nicked them.” I suppose some collections could be arranged by theological tradition–Reformed, Wesleyan, Catholic, Dispensational, maybe Humanist. I doubt that would be helpful.