In the two months since he was found guilty of using a webcam to spy on his roommate, Dharun Ravi has gone from being a symbol of antigay bias to being something of a folk hero, with rallies of his supporters urging the court to “free Dharun.” What may be most surprising is how many of those arguing in his defense are prominent gay rights advocates. With Mr. Ravi scheduled to be sentenced on Monday, many of them have argued against the prison term prosecutors have recommended. They say that Mr. Ravi is being punished for the suicide of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, although he was not charged in it, and that pinning blame on him ignores the complicated social pressures that drive gay teenagers ... Continue reading →

It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award. Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological ... Continue reading →

Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school. “I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years.” Welcome to the college education ... Continue reading →

It’s true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award. Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological ... Continue reading →

DISSIDENTS are heroic. They speak truth to power and challenge us to be better. They put human faces on the victims of abhorrent regimes. Their stories inspire the less brave. Dissidents are difficult. They moralize. They don’t compromise. They don’t know when to shut up. They don’t see the Big Picture. All the qualities that made them dissidents in the first place can make them irritants to American diplomats who have important business to transact with countries that don’t share our values. The case of the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, which briefly wrought havoc in the U.S. embassy, is a good occasion to contemplate the perennial tension between our respect for human rights and our need to deal with undemocratic regimes on issues like ... Continue reading →

It is done.On Wednesday, a president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, officially embraced same-sex marriage.He told ABC News:At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.It is important to pause here for a moment to appreciate the historical weight of this moment before recounting the president’s past “evolving” on the subject or delving into tomorrow’s strategizing about its political implications.No one should underestimate the power of this message coming from the president.Obama explained his decision in a religious framework and revealed that the first lady was involved in this decision:This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over ... Continue reading →

ROGER AILES is (a) the genius who midwifed the astoundingly successful Fox News; (b) the sharpest thorn in the side of Barack Obama; and (c) the most important surviving officer in Rupert Murdoch’s global media army. You can see why he would be a great subject for a biography. He is also (d) a political operator of the first order, which is why there are now three Ailes books in the works, two of which look to me like pre-emptive strikes by Ailes himself. We’ll come back to this little publishing intrigue, but first the news: Murdoch Inc. sinks deeper and deeper into crisis. His newspapers hemorrhage money. The political clout that once justified all that red ink is waning, as exposés of illicit phone-hacking, ... Continue reading →

THE one thing everyone knows about North Korea is that we know very little about North Korea, except that it is miserable, totalitarian, nuclear and erratic. It is the hermit kingdom, the dark side of the moon. But thanks to many thousands of refugees who have reached freedom by way of a long underground railroad through China, we know a lot more now about the grim reality. We understand better how the government sustains its dreadful power, and where that power could be faltering. Among people who follow the country closely, there is fresh discussion of whether this most durable of monster-states could be nearing its end days, and what we should do about it. In recent weeks the news spotlight has focused on the ... Continue reading →

I was shuffling round the ward clinging to the arm of my nurse one Sunday, this winter, wondering how many more steps I had to take before I could be helped, exhausted, back into bed, when the nurse paused."Can I ask you a question?" she said. "What are you in here for?""A bilateral mastectomy with DIEP flap reconstruction," I replied."Oh," she said. "I thought you'd just had a tummy tuck."But no, I was diagnosed with breast cancer on 5 January. Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, or DCIS as it's known, is the fastest growing form of breast cancer today, thanks to new developments in mammography. But at Stage 0, level 1, it's also the smallest, earliest form. (This is a cancer that was, until recently, known ... Continue reading →