Barbaric

"As a result of the chemicals going into Diaz's arms around the elbow, he had an 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm, Hamilton said."

More Life is Humorous Brought to you by The New York Times

Take Swarthmore, the elite college half an hour’s drive from Ursinus. With an annual budget of $106 million to educate just under 1,500 undergraduates, Swarthmore spends about $73,690 a student. But its tuition, room, board and fees in the last academic year were little more than $41,000.

“The half of our student body whose families are paying the full sticker price are paying $41,000 for something that costs $73,000,” said Suzanne P. Welsh, the treasurer. “So they’re getting a great discount.”

What makes it all work is Swarthmore’s $1.3 billion endowment, which throws off enough income to cover 43 percent of the operating budget.

“You’re trying to create the best educational experience for your students, and that costs money,” said Tom Tritton, president of Haverford College. “I sometimes say to parents, ‘I can make it cheaper if you want.’ ”

Still, none of this explains why colleges like Swarthmore and Ursinus — with different student-faculty ratios, endowments and reputations — end up with tuition and fees only a few hundred dollars apart, or less. Or why Harvard’s tuition and fees, at $33,709, are virtually the same as theirs.

Yet the same strategy proved disastrous for North Carolina Wesleyan College. Ten years ago that college cut tuition and fees by 22 percent, to $7,150. But it attracted fewer wealthy applicants and more poor ones, who needed more aid even as the revenue generated from tuition declined.

“It didn’t work out the way it had been hoped,” said Ian David Campbell Newbould, the college’s president. “People don’t want cheap.” [Except the poor, but they don't count.]

But they do apparently want a deal, or at least the perception of one. Lucie Lapovsky, a consultant who was once president of Mercy College in New York, conducted a study asking students to choose between a college charging $20,000 and offering no aid, and one charging $30,000 and offering a $10,000 scholarship. Students chose the pricier option.

“Americans seem to like college on sale,” Dr. Lapovsky said.

Many administrators say that without raising prices, they could not maintain or expand economic diversity among the student body. In other words, making college more expensive for some enables less well off students to go.

Life is Humorous

The company said it was setting aside $16.5 billion for salaries, bonuses and benefits, or an average of $622,000 for each employee, although much larger payouts usually go to the bankers who arrange business deals or sell corporate stock to investors than to other kinds of employees.

“When these guys learn what their bonuses are, we are among the first people they call,” said Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of the Corcoran Group, a residential brokerage. “They call their mothers, and then their real estate brokers.”

“The luxury market is very dramatically affected by bonuses,” Ms. Consolo said. “We are talking furs, jewelry, apparel and beauty items like $250 jars of face cream. Anything that makes them look good or feel good.”

Luxury spas are likely to see an influx of business as well, she side, as executives use part of their bonuses to send their spouses on spa vacations.

Convetional Wisdom

"It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase 'conventional wisdom.' He did not consider it a compliment. 'We associate truth with convenience,' he wrote, 'with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.' Economic and social behavior, Galbraith continued, 'are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.'

"So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting--though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false--noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking--is a nice place to start asking questions."

Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics, Harper Collins, 2005, pp. 89-90.

That Hurts.

All I can think about is The Wire

For ourselves, we spent more than a decade with such kids, and we pretty much know what that passage means. We understand the chaos of their so-called education, and we understand how confused they are—how badly they lack basic skills. (We also know how hard they try to ignore the intellectual chaos around them—chaos they didn’t create.) But no—they don’t belong in ninth-grade algebra, in service to “a relatively new idea in the faddish realm of education reform.” We want to see those kids pushed hard; we want to seem them required to perform. But demands on students must be reasonable. In a world where ninth-graders “still count on their fingers,” we’ll assert that this new demand isn’t.

It’s very hard for middle-class people to understand what goes on in those schools. It’s hard to grasp what that passage means—to understand how bad things are for the kids whom that passage describes. It’s very hard to picture that world. We’ll assert that—understandably—many readers can’t do it. And in the absence of such understanding, simple “solutions” will come to mind. For the latest beguiling but tragic example, see David Broder’s new column.

Coltrane

"Coltrane was mid-solo on the first number, 'All of You,' when the whistling and catcalls began. ... A breathless flurry [of notes] cascaded forth. Coltrane built up steam, leaping between registers, finding sounds that tested ears attuned to more mellow tones. ... So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn't play well, that he was playing the wrong notes involuntarily. [They thought] too much drugs or alcohol or something like this. So they started to whistle.

"For the first time, most Parisians were witnessing the raw, boundless intensity that would guide the rest of Coltrane's career; what had been a tentative, experimental breeze when he first upped with Miles was becoming a full-force gale. ...

"Following Mile's habitual set-closer, 'The Theme,' [French club impresario Frank] Tenet rushed backstage:

" 'So, after the show, I said to John, 'You're too new for the people, they don't hear much of what they liked in the past. You go too far.' And he always had a little smile on his face. He said, 'I don't go far enough.' "

Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme, Penguin, 2002, pp. 3-5.