After Obama Endorsement, Fewer Republicans Support Gay Marriage Thursday, May 24, 2012 By Anna Sale : Reporter for It's A Free Country After President Obama announced his personal support for legalizing gay marriage earlier this month, much of the attention has focused how this has moved the opinions of minorities his way. A poll this week shows Republican support for gay marriage has also moved since, but it has gone the other way. Polling by ABC News and The Washington Post has tracked support for legalizing gay marriage by party since 2004. Eight years ago, 16 percent of Republicans thought it should be legal. That steadily increased up to 39 percent in March of this year. After Obama’s announcement, Republican support for legalized gay marriage ... Continue reading →
Why Do We Care More About Diversity on TV Than In Our Schools?Protest got a black character added to "Girls." So why are we so silent on segregation in the classroom? HBOThe cast from Lena Durham's "Girls" on HBORooks' book is White Money Black Power: African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher EducationAs soon as it premiered last month, HBO’s new series, Girls, was roundly criticized for the lack of racial diversity in the cast. Filmed in Brooklyn, the show chronicles the lives of four white female friends who have recently graduated from college. TV critics immediately questioned how it was possible for the stars to only have white friends and chastised Hollywood for perpetuating the fiction of such extreme levels of ... Continue reading →
The note arrived in a nearly empty box sent to TIME’s Beijing Bureau. All copies of TIME Magazine’s May 14, 2012 issue with a cover entitled The People’s Republic of Scandal had been “safeguarded by customs.” Apparently, some customs officer had been entrusted with counting each confiscated copy ; there were, the receipt noted, 62 seized magazines. At the bottom of the customs document, there were five categories (with boxes to be ticked next to them) that described the possible fate of the seized magazines: 1. To be returned to sender 2. To be taxed 3. To be inspected 4. To be declared 5. To be dealt with. Our 62 magazines fell into the last category. They were being “dealt with.” Like other foreign news ... Continue reading →
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has certainly weighed-in on the Obama administration's approach to the financial sector in the past, and recently Newark Mayor Cory Booker's remarks on private equity have dominated the news. It turns out, however, that any number of other American municipalities are larger than Newark. Some of them even have black mayors! Perhaps someone will phone them all up to see what they think about Obama, Romney, and private equity. Here's a list (note that for these purposes we're counting municipalities rather than metro areas, since mayors are at issue): Continue reading →
When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the "secret" trick: smacking the "57" logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT Ph.D. candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been been hold up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem. The result? LiquiGlide, a "super slippery" coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging--though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus ... Continue reading →
