Althouse

1. A high school teacher says the kids roasted him for eating lunch "with no bev."

2. Everyone should live like a grandmother — 10 reasons!

3. What if it had been Ben Affleck slapping Jerry Seinfeld? — asks Michael Rapaport.

4. Maybe time is a landscape, and the dead are on the other side of a hill... or so Einstein seems to have written to a friend whose husband had died.

5. Four young brothers pitch barbershop quartet singing.

In August 2019, Stephens sent a complaint to a George Washington University professor and the university's provost about a tweet in which the professor called Stephens a "bedbug." The topic of Stephens's next column was the "rhetoric of infestation" used by authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. The column was interpreted as criticism of the GWU professor and other critics of Stephens.

Talking about a human being as filth or disease... I thought we weren't doing that anymore. I thought you could get canceled for that....

Basically a GWU professor called Stephens a bedbug and sent a complaint to the university provost and wrote a full column on how comparing people to bugs is something Nazis do, etc.

When HE says someone is filth that should be washed away, though, it's different. Why? Well...it just is, and anyone who questions that is probably a Nazi!

As a Christian woman who was married to a Jew for nearly 60 years, I find this column incredibly unsettling. The idea of labeling an entire religion (or race or gender) as this or that leads to nothing good...and often to things that are very bad. Where do we take this? Jews are smarter and therefore a bigger threat? Groups that have not won many Nobel prizes are stupid? And since when have we decided that IQ test scores are true measures of intelligence - a trait difficult to define in any case. When my husband was a boy, he was often chased down the street by neighboring children yelling "Christ Killer" at him. "Smarter" is just another label. I am amazed that the Times published this.

This is baffling. It is hard to picture a corresponding column being written about whatever ethnic group has the lowest average “IQ” and why they are prone to mediocrity, so I’m not sure I agree this angle is acceptable even in its positive light. I think we would collectively be quick to dismiss the reverse as problematic, at best. And how interesting that the author is so careful to clarify Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic or other Jewish sects. I’m interested to hear about cultural teachings that may lead to excellence, but this seems... really off the mark.

[Benjamin] Franklin coined the phrase "Time is Money", and spelt out the associated opportunity cost reasoning in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748): “Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.” 

The average Japanese, Einstein wrote, is “unproblematic, impersonal, he cheerfully fulfills the social function which befalls him without pretension, but proud of his community and nation. Forsaking his traditional ways in favor of European ones does not undermine his national pride.”

While Einstein used male pronouns for deeper reflections about the Japanese, his thoughts about women were more about their physical appearance than their personality. Japanese women, he wrote as he observed them on the ship, “look ornate and bewildered. … Black-eyed, black-haired, large-headed, scurrying.”

His reflections about the Chinese, with whom he spent far less time, were more callous, even insulting. Though he called the Chinese “industrious,” he also described them as “filthy” and “obtuse.” They’re a “peculiar herd-like nation,” Einstein wrote, “often more like automatons than people.” He saw them as intellectually inferior, quoting — instead of challenging — Portuguese teachers he met during his travels who claimed that the Chinese “are incapable of being trained to think logically” and “have no talent for mathematics.”

There was, as Rosenkranz described, a “healthy dose of extreme misogyny”:

I noticed how little difference there is between men and women; I don’t understand what kind of fatal attraction Chinese women possess which enthralls the corresponding men to such an extent that they are incapable of defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring.

His reflections in the few days he spent in China also reveal Einstein’s tendency to perceive foreigners as a threat.

“It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races,” he wrote. “For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

The Imperial Hotel! Presumably, he was in the version of it that lasted from 1922-1967, and that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a man who did not live a calm and modest life.

We cannot solve the problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them

"Einstein's famous saying in Copenhagen", as quoted in a FBIS Daily Report: East Europe (4 April 1995), p. 45

His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Nichols' father's family had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution, and settling in Germany around 1920. Nichols' mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother.

Mr. Nichols said in interviews that though he did not know it at the time, his work with Ms. May was his directorial training. Asked by Ms. Ephron in 1968 if improvisation was good training for an actor, he replied that it was because it accommodates the performer to the idea of taking care of an audience.

“But what I really thought it was useful for was directing,” he said, “because it also teaches you what a scene is made of — you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And improvisation teaches you that you must answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing.”

Of course, I personally hope that one day (when he's a little less busy) Taylor will say a bit more on the subject, and show that he understands why the shirt wasn't okay. Science is not a welcoming place for women, even today, and the only people who can truly make it more welcoming are the men who run the show. If a stellar scientist walks into work -- and then says hello to the whole world -- wearing a sexist shirt, what kind of message are we sending to future scientists?

Ronnie: Do you ever change your clothes?
Seth Brundle: What?
Ronnie: Your clothes. You're always wearing the same clothes.
Seth Brundle: No, these are clean. I change my clothes every day.
Ronnie: [looking in his closet] Five sets of exactly the same clothes?
Seth Brundle: Learned it from Einstein. This way I don't have to expend my thought on what I have to wear next, I just grab the next set on the rack.