Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon.
Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down.
Medical Dispatch: Superbugs: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems
Success in the sciences unquestionably takes a lot of hard work, sustained over many years. Students usually have to catch the science bug in grade school and stick with it to develop the competencies in math and the mastery of complex theories they need to progress up the ladder. Those who succeed at the level where they can eventually pursue graduate degrees must have not only abundant intellectual talent but also a powerful interest in sticking to a long course of cumulative study.
How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science - Chronicle.com
globeandmail.com: We must green the market
On Language - Me, Myself and I - NYTimes.com
Ontario is not Alberta, and the philosophy that provincial rights should be paramount has always had to compete with a powerful sense that Canada comes first.
globeandmail.com: Ontario struggles to decide whether or not it exists
BBC NEWS | Magazine | No time to think?
The New Atlantis » The Hydrogen HoaxUnfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age.
Bridges Still Crumble, a Year After the I-35 Disaster - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com
The café operates on the honour system: Grab what you want, drop your money into an old streetcar fare box next to the doughnut counter and waltz out.
At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? - Series - NYTimes.com
… the result will be an open culture of trust which gives scientists a real incentive to outsource problems, and contribute in areas where they have a great comparative advantage.
Reading up on the upcoming Polaris Music Prize reminded me of Patrick Watson, last year’s winner of the prize. His “Close to Paradise” album is inventive with intriguing lyrics, unique sounds, and an often driving piano track. Particular stand out tracks are Luscious Life, Drifters, and The Great Escape. The album is well worth considering and I’m looking forward to listening to the short-listed artists for this year’s prize.
At one moment the patient experiences a painful phantom limb; at another he sees a mirror image of his intact hand and the pain disappears
How the Mind Works: Revelations - The New York Review of Books
Toronto, in my opinion, is uniquely a city of neighbourhoods, and the most important person in my job is the neighbourhood cop.
Stop the presses! Crime rates are falling
A typically clear analysis from Jeffrey Simpson on the divergence between the actual rate of crime and the attention devoted to crime by the media. Statistically, Canada has never been safer – particularly in Ontario.
It is one of Canada’s pathetic ironies that the two provincial premiers least concerned about greenhouse gas emissions govern the provinces most at risk from climate change.
One might suppose that such a recurrent chain of blunders would gall a politically potent segment of the population. That it has evidently failed to do so in 2008 may be the only important unreported fact of this otherwise compulsively documented election season.