揭开光鲜的人物的画皮吧。。。 My children’s education is my greatest extravagance and, possibly, folly. By the time my son follows his two sisters, God willing, through college, I will have spent $1.7 million on tuition and other unavoidable add-ons (SAT tutors are one pricey add-on) for my kids’ fancy schools. In “The Price of Admission,” a delicious account of gross inequities in high places, Daniel Golden tells me that I’ve gotten away cheap. A son of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, got into Princeton because the Frist family “had lavished tens of millions of dollars on a new student center” there. Margaret Bass, daughter of the oil magnate Robert Bass, got into Stanford after her old man gave the university $25 million. Jessica Zofnass’s Harvard-educated father endowed a scholarship in environmental studies around the time of her admission. Charles Kushner, a real estate developer who went to jail for witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, pledged $2.5 million to Harvard — Kushner himself went to N.Y.U. — which did the trick for his son Jared (who recently bought The New York Observer). Golden is distressed by the notion that his book might become a buyer’s guide, but his answer to the question “What’s it cost to buy your kid into Harvard?” seems to be $2.5 mil, plus what you’ve contributed to politicians, legally or not, so they’ll make a follow-up call for you. Golden tells us that the admissions process, at least at the 100 top colleges and universities, is not a meritocracy — and exactly who thought it was? — but a marketplace. Every spot is up for bid. Some people bid with intelligence, which has obvious worth to the institution; some with cold cash, with its certain value; and others with the currency of connections and influence and relationships that serve the institution’s interests. The ultimate result of trading limited spaces for ever increasing value is Harvard’s preposterous endowment of $26 billion. Golden, apparently quite the innocent, is hopping mad about this. If there were any doubt, Golden’s muckraking investigation — he’s the Ida Tarbell of college admissions — reveals that almost every word uttered by representatives of the top colleges about the care and nuance and science of the much vaunted admissions process is bunk. Harvard may say it accepts 1 in 10 applicants, but, Golden writes, as many as 60 percent of the places in a top school are already spoken for by higher bidders, hence reducing, in the parlance, the “unhooked” applicant’s chances to . . . well, you do the math. Actually, if you do get into a college by merit alone, that may mean there’s something wrong with the college. You don’t want to be in a club that would have you as a member — which is the entire marketing credo of America’s top schools. But back to my $1.7 million. Golden, who went to Harvard, is not objecting to superhuman tuition costs, or even to the fact that lots of people — my offspring included — go to expensive private secondary schools (where the same admissions corruption is at work) in order to have a better shot at getting into these 100 top colleges. His focus is the excess on top of the excesses already built into the system. What he’s saying is that hard-won privilege should not, damn it, be trumped by greater privilege. Photo Credit Lou Beach While Golden mounts a fire-breathing, righteous attack on the culture of superprivilege, this is also a rather conventionally-minded view of education. He subscribes to the central assumptions about the Ivy League in America. The Ivies, he says, pave your way “into leadership positions in business and government” and “serve as the gateway to affluence and influence in America.” If this is true, it explains why the Ivy League would turn into a marketplace. How could it not, being of such value and limited supply? But the obvious solution, to make more colleges more equal, is not the case he’s arguing. Golden wants some people — people like himself — to have access to elite universities. This is his other central and unquestioned assumption: If you do well in high school and on your SAT’s, then you’re the best and the brightest and deserve to be among the elite. The possibility that such performance might mean you too are gaming the system doesn’t get in the way of this book’s indignation about the rich. That a top high school student may also be among the market’s extreme and grotesque creations — i.e., an adolescent who accepts authority, willingly does absurd amounts of homework, is respectful of his or her college guidance counselor, listens to his or her parents and is a dedicated standardized-test-taker to boot — doesn’t seem to occur to Golden. He’s on the side of the upper-middle-class grind and suck-up. This book is, in many ways, a tabloid tale (though it began as a series in The Wall Street Journal, where Golden covers education). The author waves his finger in shocked-shocked fashion at “left-wing Hollywood movie stars and right-wing tycoons, old-money dynasties and nouveau riche” who’ve written checks or pulled connections to get their kids into good schools, naming as many rich kids who can’t cut the mustard but who got in anyway as he possibly can. He’s got grave conspiracy concerns too: “Once in college, moreover, these wealthy students are often tapped to join socially exclusive groups — eating clubs, fraternities, secret societies — where they hobnob with influential alumni and prospective employers.” There are even quasi-secret societies for rich parents — like Harvard’s Committee on University Resources, where donors have generally given at least $1 million — membership in which pretty much ensures admission to your slob of a kid. (Golden does his homework here: “By examining ‘Who’s Who’ entries, alumni records and other sources, I found that 218 of 424 COUR members, or more than half, have had at least one child at Harvard.”) He rags relentlessly on poor Albert Gore III, whose father sneaked him into Harvard — and who, believe it or not, smoked pot. (Golden is something of an avenger, exacting retribution for too much wealth and status by dishing about every rich and famous father’s kid’s lackluster SAT scores.) Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Advertisement Continue reading the main story Golden’s larger point is about the modern culture of money. He quotes The Economist: “America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain.” But he’s immune to the greater comedy of manners and so misses a potentially more profound story: the joke may be on us — not just on the rich, but on everybody who’s clawed his way and his kid’s way into big-brand colleges. By lots of measures — say, the great number of perfectly ordinary alma maters of top C.E.O.’s or of Rhodes scholars or of Internet hotshots — where you go to school arguably matters less now than ever before. (In some ways, it matters in a reverse sense: these days you probably can’t get elected president if you went to Harvard; George Bush is president in part because he made himself so anti-Yale.) If you’re not a natural salesman or a consummate show-off or possessed with superb people skills in entrepreneurial, show-me-the-money, keep-it-simple-stupid America, you’re a zhlub. And these talents may not be so easy to acquire in snobby, self-conscious institutions. The colleges we’ve eagerly bribed on behalf of our genetic material are most likely not just another part of the market economy, but a bubble market in themselves — of greatest value to the closed circle of people who pay the money that gives them value. Yeah, we’re getting hosed. Michael Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is “Autumn of the Moguls.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Wolff2.t.html 维基百科： According to journalist Daniel Golden , Kushner and his brother Joshua Kushner were admitted despite modest academic credentials after their father had made a $2.5million donation to the university , with the director of the school's college preparatory program describing Jared Kushner's admission to be "an unusual choice for Harvard to make" given that he was "not anywhere near the top of his class." At Harvard, Kushner was a member of the Fly Club and bought and sold buildings in Somerville, Massachusetts as a hobby. In 2007, Kushner graduated from the New York University where he earned his J.D. degree and his M.B.A. degree; His father had previously made a $3 million donation to NYU in 2001. He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau 's office.
科普政治法律历史都没人看，我还是写诗吧。 Big Bang Theory "The Romance Resonance" (S7E06) 里 Howard 给其女友写了首诗，叫 If I Didn't Have You，诗中写道 “ A candle without a wick... I’d be cheese without the mac, You’re like Uranium 235 and I’m Uranium 238, Almost inseparable isotopes. ... I’d be string theory without any string.... I’d be binary code without a one,” 等等。看似非常nerdy，但我用理论物理的眼光一看，发现有问题。于是赋诗应之。 作为新诗风格，英文正文之外，还加上中文伴唱。我这诗名就叫 Because I have you 好了。 Because I Have You Ever since I saw you, you saved my heart and came to my dream. (不愿醒） If I were the candle and you were the wick, you would let me burn. (心如焚） If you were the mac and I were the cheese, both of us would be eaten (啃啃啃） If I were the dot and you were the com, the bubble might burst faster than lightning. （南柯一梦） If you were like U238 and I were U235 We could be separated by gas diffusion （气气就分） If I were string theory, you would need a tenth dimension (十面玲珑） If we were like changing electric and magnetic fields, we would be forever after each other, chasing in vain. （累死人） If you were the one and I was the binary code, when you were away I would have just nothing. (只剩零） If we were like the nerds who sang that song, we might as well say Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam. （搜搜就懂） So, darling, let's just swim, quark quark is beautiful singing, close, we have freedom , yet afar, we have confinement , and the gluon is such a wonderful thing. （这才 modern ） 注解： 1. String theory 需要10维空间； 2 . quark ，鸭子叫声。量子色动力学（QCD）表明，夸克配对之间靠得近时，彼此几乎没有约束， 存在 渐进自由 (asymptotic freedom) ; 但是越拉开，吸引力不会变小，反而越大，导致无法分开，这是我们无法观察到单个的夸克的原因。QCD里的这个现象叫做 夸克囚禁 （quark confinement) 或者颜色囚禁 （ color confinement ) 。
这是John Piper 的回答，我非常同意。关于婴儿死亡去哪里，圣经没有明确的说法，但是John Piper根据罗马书1章所做的推论，我认为是合理的： http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/ask-pastor-john/what-happens-to-infants-who-die--2 I think they're all saved. In other words, I don't buy the principle that says that children born into "covenant families" are secure, and children born into "non-covenant families" aren't. I don't go there. My reason for thinking they're all saved is because of the principle in Romans 1 where Paul argues that all people know God, and they are "without excuse" because they do not honor him or glorify him as God. His argument is that they are without excuse because they know things, as though accountability in the presence of God at the Last Judgment will be based, at least partly, on whether they had access to necessary knowledge. And God says they've all got access to knowledge, because they can look at the things he has made and see his power and deity. But they suppress that knowledge instead of submitting to it, therefore they're all condemned. So I ask the question: OK, is the principle being raised there that, if you don't have access to the knowledge that causes you to be held accountable, therefore you will not be accountable? And I think that's the case. I think babies and imbeciles—that is, those with profound mental disabilities—don't have access to the knowledge that they will be called to account for. Therefore, somehow in some way, God, through Christ, covers these people. So that, in a nutshell, is why I think all children who die in infancy are elect and will be, through Jesus Christ, saved in ways that I may not know how, as God honors this principle of accountability.
标签: because
