March 18, 2005
Summer at Harvard?
Are you a Washington, DC graduate student, academic or researcher planning to spend the summer working at or near Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts? If you have a comfortable one bedroom apartment near a DC Metro stop, you should consider swapping apartments with me!
As you can see, I have a lovely, 5th floor, corner unit apartment in a secured elevator building on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Shepard Street. It is almost across the street from Harvard Law School, and is a ten minute stroll to Harvard Yard, Widener Library or the Harvard Square T stop.
The apartment is fully furnished, and includes a microwave, television, DVD player, and library composed mainly of free-market oriented economics and public policy tomes, moral philosophy, political theory and period fiction featuring rich, unhappy people in fancy dresses (Austen, Wharton, James, etc.).
Within a two block radius, there are two gourmet coffee shops, a Bank of America machine, three bars at varying levels of niceness, a classy little grocery store and several restaurants. Or just walk to the Square for everything else you might want.
I'd like to make an agreement with a DC resident to switch apartments for 8-10 weeks this summer. Dates are flexible. I'll be working full-time with a think tank in downtown DC. You would be my houseguest and I would be yours! No money changes hands. Please contact me if interested at marie AT mariegryphon Dot com.
March 14, 2005
Traffic Can't
A hilarious cartoon for Seattlites about the city’s various proposed rail project boondoggles.
From Reason.
Harvard State
Confirmation for those who have long thought Harvard was a separate country:
”Are we citizens or employees?” Stephen Owen, one of only 17 elite ”university professors” at Harvard, asked at a Feb. 22 faculty meeting. ”If we have become employees, I think we would like to know.”
From the Boston Globe
Oh, and I couldn’t resist the title, which I must confess is the best derisive nickname I’ve heard yet for the Kennedy School. Youch.
Attention Deficit Defense
Newsweek reports, “Two new books advance the controversial notion that distractibility, poor impulse control and emotional sensitivity have flip sides that are actually strengthsââ¬ânamely creativity, energy and intuition.”
March 9, 2005
Explaining That I'm Just Visiting
I'll be in The District between March 24th and April 2nd. Drop me a line if you want to get together.
March 8, 2005
March 1, 2005
Korsgaard's Ambiguity
This month in Recent Ethical Theory we are reading Thomas Nagel’s very interesting book, The Possibility of Altruism. Professor Korsgaard enjoys seeking a classroom laugh from time to time as a means of determining that we’re still listening. She therefore substituted “Larry Summers” for “G. E. Moore” yesterday when recounting Nagel’s famous hypothetical involving an unsuspecting pedestrian and an oncoming Mac truck.
The reference to Summers’ recent mishap illicited the predictable giggle from the audience, but I noticed that it could be taken in at least two ways. Either 1) tenured female Professor Korsgaard was expressing her ire regarding Summers’ comments by placing him in the path of the truck, or 2) she was characterizing the feminist reaction to his remarks as the Mac truck, and was amused that Larry had been blissfully unaware of the dangerous ground on which he tread.
Korsgaard is a sufficiently complex woman that, though I’ve been in her class twice a week all year, I can’t call this one.
By the way, special bonus points are available for convincing me that we owe a duty to our past selves.