Quote from Robert Manning, former editor of the Atlantic:

Cynicism deflects attention from our far more widespread flaw, incorrigible sentimentalism.

Magnolia Fun Chum, North Neck, and Jesus: coming to a Coca-Cola vending machine near you? Not anytime soon, says James Lileks:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/804/2823930.html

I appreciate all the level-headed feedback to my Detroit Free Press op-ed yesterday. For the curious, the positive is edging out the negative roughly 60-40. The most common complaints are that 1) I belittled full-time mothers and 2) I underestimate how sacrifices are necessary for parenting. The Freep's subtitle and cartoon that ran with my article may have set the wrong tone for what I was trying to say, so let me try to clear it up:

I said in the article I don't criticize Hughes for doing what she felt she had to do. That's her call; I'm not running her life nor wish to. What irked me, as I said at the beginning, is how American culture in the 21st Century still accepts the recent assumption that such a move is logical for a woman but not for a man. Why are only women expected to make these kind of moves? Why is it seen as natural for a man to put his career over the kids, but not for a woman to do so, and not for a man to put kids over a career (I say this expecting to be a full-time Dad at some point in my life, so don't accuse me of being numb to family).

Of course, in a truly balanced world, society would function so that neither career nor kids loses out much more than the other, and neither man nor woman is expected to have unique responsibilities inherent to their gender. As for parental sacrifice, America should be much more tolerant of the need for it in a healthy society, and the Church should be much more tolerant of those who feel they are called to serve in certain jobs that may require them to sacrifice some or all of their family capacity. In the meantime we need to change the conventional wisdom that men should worship careers and that women are ineligible for one at all. And here I guess it is relevant to point out that Hughes will still be pulling it major dough as a part-time consultant to the President. Sitting in the family room with phone in hand, the bucks piling up...maybe she's found an effective balance between work and family after all.

Nice write-up in Chicago Magazine on Joyce Winnecke and Bill Adee, Chicago journalism's super-couple who made the Sun-Times a must-read (in news and sports, respectively) and will now try to translate that energy to the very different climate of the Tribune. Includes this Winnecke quote about the Trib from 1999: "I don't think it would be fun to work at a paper with unlimited resources."

http://www.chicagomag.com/pressbox/050902pressbox.htm

A lament for the death of pre-modern classical architecture in skyscrapers, with the post-9/11 outlook for the skyscraper looking very foggy:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_urbanities-how_to_build.html

A version of my family values rant ran in the Detroit Free Press this morning:
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/ebierma8_20020508.htm

Here's the lengthier piece from my student newspaper, Chimes:
http://clubs.calvin.edu/chimes/2002.04.26/per4.html

And, once again, the relevant paragraph from Peter Perl's profile of Tom DeLay in Washington Post Magazine:

For all of Tom DeLay's public espousal of Christian values, particularly his deep commitment to family, he privately has nursed a terrible estrangement from his own mother and three siblings. After the 1988 death of his father and the rise of his career in Washington, DeLay cut off contact with all three siblings, and seven years ago he stopped attending DeLay family gatherings. He has not seen or talked to his mother, Maxine, in two years, even though she lives about 10 miles away from Sugar Land; or did he invite any of them to his daughter's 1999 wedding or even mention his mother in the published wedding announcement.

I spoke with Perl by phone yesterday. He keeps in regular contact with DeLay's siblings, and says nothing has changed in the year since his piece appeared.

For some, the meaning of the moment equals its distance to a celebrated other moment, and on the Web this is sometimes measured in seconds. There's an online live countdown for the next shuttle launch, New Year's Day 2003, the Kitty Hawk Centennial, and, of course, Star Wars. So who has less of a life--the jedi geeks or those who find it necessary to anticipate the anniversary, to the second, of Wilbur and Orville?

I was looking for the planet alignment the other night; I could only spot two of them from my suburban front lawn--Mercury and Saturn, I think. They flared liked floodlights in a parking lot. NASA is all over the extraterrestrial traffic with a daily update site and amateur pictures from around the world:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/06may_pillar.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/spaceweather/planets/gallery_may02.html

How's this for blogging in an online news age: I'm linking to a cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, the wry but levelheadedly liberal cartoonist, which is linked to (from webzine Salon) on his blog, which was referred to by John Leo in his national column, which was linked to (through the NY Post's website) by the mainstream blog of Poynter's Romenesko. All of which is merely to introduce this funny cartoon. It's Tomorrow's parting shot at U.S. News, where it turns out he briefly worked:
http://www.salonmag.com/comics/tomo/1998/02/23tomo.html

Numbers: 27: Millions of slaves in the world today, according to Disposable People author Kevin Bales on NPR today.

Poynter's Dr. Ink dissects the cliche that journalism should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." The original quote from Finley Peter Dunne was actually complaining about how newspapers had too much power--not prescribing how they should function:

Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th'ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

The afflicting scoop:
http://www.poynter.org/dr_ink/042402.htm