And so it begins – it’s NCAA bracket time!
Next week: 3/24/08 to 3/31/08 – Brooklyn Restaurant Week.
The passing of Anthony Minghella, director of the movie “The English Patient” and other films.
The passing of Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer.
Harvard Law’s attempt to persuade law students to consider the public service/public interest practice of law seems to be pretty ambitious – a tuition waiver? Will it change anything, in terms of getting law students and new lawyers to think about more than Big Firms and stuff? Hmm!
Finished reading “Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction” by Eric Foner, with visual essays by Joshua Brown (commentary on the visual arts during that era) — powerful and well-written, it’s apparently a book that was a companion to a documentary. It covers a lot of ground about race relations and politics of the pre-Civil War, Civil War, and post-Civil War eras – and Foner also demonstrates the eras’ legacies to today’s politics (coincidentally, I finished reading just as the reactions are still evolving about Barack Obama’s speech on race). The pictures and the text about the horrific crimes of terror against black Americans during Reconstruction and the complexities of Reconstruction – it makes one think, emotionally and intellectually. Highly recommended book.
My one big regret from college was not having been able to take Foner’s class on the Reconstruction period (i think it was due to scheduling conflict) – not only is Foner amazing as a history professor (and quite a writer), but the period just leaves so much food for thought, because we’re still grappling with the implications. Not only did it affect black-white interaction, it affected everything else – how to define race; who has political power; immigration policy – who gets to be let into America, who gets to be “American” (not to mention telling Chinese people at that time that they were not welcome – and letting Asians and Latinos not fit in either the black-white paradigm).
And, following up on my referring to the Obama speech – I do recommend hearing/watching the whole speech. Soundbites do not do it justice – Obama’s raising a big topic that should be discussed, carefully, yes, but with the aim to resolve relations – almost in a mediation/conflict resolution kind of way, I’d like to think. It’s not easy, and there are lots of other things to deal with (economy, national security, gender relations, etc.), but we can’t ignore it either. Nuance is hard to accept for a lot of people (it didn’t help, say, John Kerry’s campaign), but maybe the American voter will take into consideration the totality of the circumstances, as we’d say in the area of law?
We are living in interesting times.