Reagan’s Unmatched Moxie BEING OLD, I spend considerable time correcting facile modern accounts of long-ago events that I happened to have witnessed. They rarely check out, as George Orwell so aptly warned, the truth having been pushed down the memory hole. For example, the Vietnam War was not a futile exercise in American hubris but rather a heroic effort that convinced (for a time) the Russian Politburo and the Chinese Communist Party that they could not afford to conquer the world by proxy. In…

by Mark Franke “People talk about the divide in this country as though we were standing on opposite sides of a chasm. When the reality is that we are standing over the chasm, as if on a bridge. You’re never going to get everyone to cross to one side or the other. Some people can’t accept that. If they can’t get everyone to their side, they’d rather blow up the bridge.” The above is quoted…

Do You Trust Your University? WE DON’T HAVE opinion surveys measuring the trust Hoosiers have in their particular state universities. My guess is that after the spring pro-Hamas encampments the percentage that still think that Indiana University, for example, is doing a decent job is around 10 percent, or roughly the number of people wandering around cognitively disabled in some way. Is that fair to the many great teachers on the Bloomington campus? No, but the many great…

Eco-Devo: The Missing Studies THE GOOD NEWS is that the national media is losing its clout. The bad news is that so is the local media. Here is Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal on our newly acquired hype immunity: “Older voters a decade or two ago assumed anything on a screen had the authority of the evening news. Now they understand that graphically ornate, professional-looking rubbish is still rubbish. Indeed, the big challenge for media outlets, at…

by John Gaski, Ph.D. What does the word “Islamophobia” mean? What is its formal definition? You can take your time to answer. Actually, this is an easy question because there is more than one correct answer.  In the meantime, a diversion: When was the first time you ever heard of the word “Islamophobia,” as best you can remember? Other than very young readers, who have heard it their whole lives, the likely answer for most would be about 20 years…

Envy on the Court For the use of the membership only. THE CAITLIN CLARK controversy gives us a chance to argue the point that America is not divided by race (or no more than any other society since the beginning of time) but rather is divided by envy. And that, sadly, is on the Chennedy Carter side of things. Envy, as regular readers of this space know, is a fascinating subject — and a powerful if ugly social…

by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. Certain high schoolers have definite professional goals and informed parents. Others are inclined towards careers about which they and their parents are clueless. How can students and their parents get a handle on what is required for entry into certain occupations?  A quick start is to prompt artificial intelligence (AI) to list requirements. In a matter of seconds, ChatGPT, one of many Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs, provided the following information for a career in nursing (accessed…

by Judge Dan Heath Like many of you, I watched with interest the recent so-called “Trump Hush Money Trial.” I was an Allen County trial judge for more than twenty-two years from January of 1997 to April of 2018 and, during that time, I conducted dozens of civil jury trials. So during the Trump trial I kept a watchful eye on the management of the trial under New York law.  Specifically, I was a stunned…

by Mark Franke Now that the primary election season has passed but the November campaigning cycle is not yet up and running, there is time for detached reflection on how our democracy works. Or doesn’t. The past month was an unusual one for us residents of my hometown, Fort Wayne. In the Republican primary there were eight candidates for the Third District House of Representatives seat to replace incumbent Jim Banks, who was running in the…

by Mark Franke “Counterurbanization,” a term new to me, is the phenomenon that Americans increasingly are moving from large cities to rural areas. This reverses a trend in the other direction, one that began with the Industrial Revolution and continued until just recently.  So why the change? And more important, what will its effect be 20 years down the road? The first question is obvious; one need only peruse an Internet news feed to see…