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Mark Greif laments that a new biography of Richard Rorty doesn't cover the last period of the philosopher's life when he reached beyond academia:
By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer, known for his advocacy of animal rights and the acceptability of euthanizing severely disabled newborns. Rorty, in his time, was accused of murdering truth. He argued the position that there was no standpoint outside of human descriptions of the world from which to decide that any one view was false and another true. There were only descriptions in more or less convincing language, with more or less convincing uses, by which people might persuade one another how to live in the world.
John McQuaid reports on the death of the Washington bureau:
When the Washington-based Newhouse News Service announced last month it would shut down after Election Day, the Associated Press described it as a "supplemental wire service," a technically correct term that nevertheless conjured up images of something journalistically superfluous, like Sunday-newspaper advertising supplements. In fact, not so long ago, Newhouse's output was a great and diverse read. NNS was a national platform for the Newhouse newspaper chain. It was the home for a dozen individual papers' Washington correspondents, who produced often deep district-by-district coverage of Congress and federal agencies. A separate staff of national reporters wrote stories exploring the fault lines of the American political discussion, including race, religion, and economics -- an experiment in reinventing Washington coverage, or at least intended to give it a good tweak.
And Daniel Strauss interviews the founder of an aid group in Kashmir:
Sam Carpenter: What I found was [that] there's three types of schools. There's public schools provided by the government and private schools -- somewhat secular schools that are funded by regular folks over there -- and it's about a 50-50 split. Let me talk about what's taught in those schools: English, math, science, and a reasonable amount of history, and they have textbooks and the whole thing. But there's another kind of school over there, which I'm certain you've heard of, called a Madrassa, and these are religious schools.
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