They had been good friends as kids, co-editors of the high school newspaper. He vowed to contact her the next time he was in Richmond to visit his mother. Six months later, he did. And soon after, with Allan in the midst of a divorce, they began talking regularly. It was nice to have an adult to talk to, Page says, and she began to wrestle with feelings that they could be more than friends. "It had never occurred to me at that point to be in a relationship," she says. "It felt disloyal to Robert."

The ending is pretty remarkable.

[…] this year’s tuition at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory ($38,340 for 12th grade) and Horace Mann ($37,275 for the upper school) is higher than Harvard’s ($36,305). Those 41 schools (out of 61 New York City private schools in the national association) provided enough data to enable a 10-year analysis. (Over all, inflation caused prices in general to rise 27 percent over the past decade.)

Michael Jordan’s UNC short shorts wouldn’t fit under his Chicago Bulls short shorts, so he had to wear baggy, knee-length Bulls shorts instead, as seen here. In doing so, he broke the mold set forth by players before him. […] But soon, these extra long shorts became the favored style.  By 2003, almost every single NBA player had jettisoned the short shorts for the longer variety.

The thing is this: diamonds are not inherently scarce, and therefore not inherently valuable. This is a grand charade perpetuated quite effectively by De Beers.  To be clear: the value of diamonds is purely a result of market manipulation, nothing more.

The key is the phrase towards the end:

After a century of maneuvers to control the supply and price of diamonds, the cartel’s greatest accomplishment may be that it has transformed the illusion that diamonds are valuable into a hard reality, and the future of the diamond empire may now rest with the complicity of millions of consumers all invested in the myth that diamonds will be valuable forever.

Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults—“Remember, we’re in blue Mickey”—was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits

Lots of information about parking theory – how it works, how cities attempt to manage it, and how it has defined Los Angeles over the years.

(Of course, if you’re Miami, you just build a parking ramp so gorgeous that people want to hold wedding receptions in it.)

She’s struggling to make the point that she wasn’t gay her whole life, and then just finally admitted it.  She had two children with her college sweetheart, and lived a heterosexual life for decades.  She claims to have just made a choice later in life to….switch.

‘I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.’

Cynthia said she hasn’t always been gay and finds it ‘offensive’ that people say she has.

She continued: ‘Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.

Obviously, this has enraged a lot of people, but her point is clearly that she doesn’t want to delegitimize her previous relationships, which I can understand.

‘But I do completely feel that when I was in relationships with men, I was in love and in lust with those men.

‘And then I met Christine and I fell in love and lust with her.

[…] ‘I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realise I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.’

What she does here is explain a lot of the things that white people take for granted which people of other races cannot.  I admit that some of it was eye-opening.  Here’s a sample.

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. […]

I  can swear, or dress in second hand  clothes, or not  answer letters, without having people  attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. […]

I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial. […]

I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivious. […]

I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race. […]

I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. […]

I was playing around with a New York Times interactive tool on unemployment rates once.  It let you slice-and-dice the current unemployment rate by various criteria.  I limited it to males and then removed all other races except “Caucasian.” I found that current unemployment for white males was actually really, really low – I remember it being far lower than the healthy unemployment rate for the nation during the boom times.

My first thought: “Well, at least I’m safe.”

I will admit that white males enjoy a vast number of small, unspoken privileges.  But this essay has a tone of conspiracy, like we’re actively working to keep it this way.  I also object to the use of the word “oppress” and “oppressor.”  That implies active force, in my mind.  I don’t passively “oppress” someone, and – speaking for myself – I don’t actively do it either.

So, this one is a mixed bag.  It’s absolutely eye-opening, and worth reading for that reason alone.  I hope it affects my behavior in some subconscious way to make the world a better, more welcoming place.  But, at the same time, it stands a general indictment of my race (and, through inference) my gender which I’m not prepared to accept.

If this writer is implying that I’m an active part of a racial conspiracy, she needs to provide a little more evidence of that.

These results run 100 percent contrary to Republican dogma, which is that tax increases, especially on the rich, do not yield additional revenue because people will cease working and investing, and the economy will stagnate. Yet the hallmarks of the 1990 and 1993 budget deals were an increase in the top income tax rate; first to 31 percent from 28 percent, and then to 39.6 percent. Revenue clearly rose, as did the economy.

The argument that lowering taxes increases revenue is something I discussed last month.  This editorial claims proof that the reverse is true — raising taxes, when coupled with spending controls, lowers the deficit, apparently to zero and beyond.

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

Here’s the key:

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits [...] Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people.

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