Breaking Ranks

For those who attended Northeastern University in Boston round about the early aughts (like myself), it's no secret that the university's singular focus was cracking the top 100 of the U.S. News and World Report's vaunted rankings of the nation's best colleges. In an article timed to hit just before this year's rankings come out, Boston Magazine's Max Kutner looks at then-NU president Richard Freeland's obsession with the double digits. (Spoiler: NU garnered a #98 ranking in 2007). Turns out, there was a more intricate strategy involved than putting giant banners on campus. But like any good plan crafted in college, it still involved sitting around.

For those at Northeastern, breaking into the U.S. News top 100 was like landing a man on the moon, but Freeland was determined to try. Reverse-engineering the formulas took months; perfecting them took years. “We could say, ‘Well, if we could move our graduation rates by X, this is how it would affect our standing,’” Freeland says. “It was very mathematical and very conscious and every year we would sit around and say, ‘Okay, well here’s where we are, here’s where we think we might be able to do next year, where will that place us?’”

When I chose to attend Northeastern -- under the influence of the truckload of spiffy targeted mail that flooded my parents' mailbox during my latter years in high school -- the school was in the midst of a massive building campaign that extended its footprint into the Roxbury neighborhood, and frequently looking to up admissions standards. Not surprisingly, those were all a part of the rankings puzzle.

The more applications NU could drum up, the more students they could turn away, thus making the school appear more selective... Since studies showed that students who lived on campus were more likely to stay enrolled, the school oversaw the construction of dormitories like those in West Village—a $1 billion, seven-building complex—to improve retention and graduation rates. NU was lucky in this regard—not every urban school in the country had vast land, in the form of decrepit parking lots, on which to build a new, attractive campus.

Amid the push, skeptical students were often told that we should be thankful for these shiny new improvements and lofty rankings, since they would in turn increase the value of our shiny new degrees. Over the long run, they may turn out to be right (assuming, of course, that Bachelor's Degrees retain value). But that doesn't absolve the university for attempting to cheat the system in a manner that has little to do with education.

Along with the U.S. News and World Report's vulnerabilities, NU's tactics also serve as a gentle reminder that the college admissions process is a faceless machine that evaluates an accumulation of numbers (grades, SAT tests, activity loads), rather than the real-life tenacity, guile and heart that are required for anything remotely approaching success in the increasingly dismal and freelance-oriented job market. But don't worry. In the age of YouTube, a video could save us from this morass. From today's Baltimore Sun:

Starting with applicants for next year's class, Goucher announced Thursday that it will give students the option of submitting a video they record in lieu of transcripts or college admission exams.

The Sun reports that some of these admissions videos have already gone viral. Whether they make the infection worse remains to be seen. At the very least, the clips might gum up the works of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, making them less influential. As Kutner points out at the end of the NU article, improving one ranking is likely to come at the peril of another.

In Money magazine’s 2014 “Best Colleges for Your Money....Northeastern landed at the bottom of the third quartile, at number 433.

Dead Zones and Diets

Dead Zone isn't just the name of an Anthony Michael Hall vehicle. In the Chesapeake Bay, marine life face a scarier reality than anything Stephen King could conjure. As the Washington Post reports:

The phenomenon has been recurring in the Chesapeake whenever hot summer weather and pollution combine to trigger algae blooms that suck life-giving oxygen from the water. But this year’s dead zone was bigger than most, making 2014 the eighth-worst year since record-keeping began in the 1980s, according to monitoring data compiled by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.

That pollution is chemicals from fertilizer and wastewater that end up in the spring runoff that heads down rivers like the Susquehanna. Last week, the Baltimore Sun reported the Chesapeake's Dead Zone was at its 8th highest level. That was enough to spur declarations that the Dead Zone was "back with a vengeance" after a few relatively dormant years.

For the long term, however, there's at least one bright spot. Reporter Timothy B. Wheeler cites one example today near the point where the Susquehanna and Chesapeake meet that shows some life is starting to return.

But starting in the 1990s, the scientists say, there was a small decline in the amount of one nutrient, nitrogen, flowing from the Susquehanna. That alone was not enough to spur a rebound in underwater grasses, but a prolonged dry spell from 1997 to 2002 proved the tipping point, clearing up the water enough to allow more sunlight to reach the bottom and fuel new plant growth.

The Gulf of Mexico, which receives 40 percent of the country's runoff every year from the Mississippi River, has a Dead Zone problem the size of Connecticut.

The Dead Zone has become such a fact of life at the mouth of the Mississippi River that the research team now label their annual trip to measure its size as a cruise. On the 30th anniversary of the cruise, the Gulf's Dead Zone wasn't quite as big as it has been in record years, primarily due to lower rainfall totals than in those big years.

But it's not the rainfall that is producing the Dead Zone, it's the pollutants -- more specifically, the polluters. With the new levels in the Chesapeake making them feel fat once again, Maryland is going on a diet.

The pollution "diet" drawn up by the Maryland Department of the Environment calls for reductions in nutrients ranging from 20 percent to 40 percent in four of the five bays – Assawoman, Isle of Wight, Newport and Chincoteague. No pollution cutback is needed in Sinepuxent, the state determined, while reductions of up to 55 percent may be called for to improve water quality in the Bishopville Prong of Isle of Wight Bay, a particularly poorly flushed area, according to Tim Rule, who oversaw development of the state report.

Even though the pollution cutbacks won't completely stop the problem, they at least show that officials are willing to acknowledge Dead Zones and their crazy, choking algae. The Mississippi River could use the same kind of diet, with a formula that's tweaked for their state-sized problem. But the fish that inhabit the waters off the coast of Southeast Louisiana aren't holding their breath. There's no oxygen for them to breathe right now, anyway.

Horse Race

While America's rapidly growing heroin epidemic is getting plenty of attention at the federal level, perceptions of drug use continue to be limited by an unwillingness to confront the issue from the ground-level. After all, it's bad PR. 

Writing in today's Baltimore Sun, columnist Dan Rodricks takes stock of a Wednesday night episode of National Geographic TV's Drugs Inc. that focused on Baltimore. Rodrick looks back at the 70s, when a National Geographic writer was Charmed by Baltimore.

Kline found charm in things now gone (the aroma of McCormick spices along Light Street, Haussner's Restaurant, Hamburger's clothing store) or things that a travel writer probably would leave out today (Charles Center Plaza, the "new-town-in-town" called Coldspring.

The article was a love letter to the city, and Baltimore could not buy better publicity.

The 2014 National Geographic treatment focused more on a piece of societal fabric that is not gone. Heroin use remains high. And to quantify it, National Geographic relied on a stat that said 60,000 Baltimore residents. But, wait! Turns out, that number is wrong, and has been wrong for almost a decade.

In 2005, a Baltimore Sun reporter dug deep into data to determine if 60,000 addicts number had any validity, and the result was negative. "The number is almost certainly wrong," The Sun concluded. "It was, at best, a hit-or-miss guess to begin with."

Rodricks rightfully points out that relying on bad data only leads to sensationalism, which is likely what Drugs Inc. is guilty of here -- at least when it comes to statistics.

But when it comes to looking at the recent nationwide resurgence of heroin use, it doesn't matter whether the opiate "capital" is Baltimore or actual longtime heroin overdose death leader, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Now that Attorney General Eric Holder and other authorities have acknowledged that heroin use is an epidemic, any attempt to look into the deadly drug use is valuable. Reporting of the sort that Drugs Inc. engages in is tough to come by. A Drugs Inc. episode that focused on New Orleans equated the city's party culture to its drug use. That's a connection that's likely accurate, but rarely made -- even, in the HBO series Treme, by the likes of underbelly-scratcher David Simon.

The drug trafficking web that includes street-level dealers, law enforcement agents and the users in between takes a lot of time and human capital to weave, and our understanding is only better for the time the show spent -- even if TV news production temptations get in the way. As a woman who lost a friend to heroin in New Orleans told me earlier this year for an article that appeared in NOLA Defender, the new version of heroin use is all around us, but often hidden.

“They go to work, they pay their bills, a lot of them are moms and dads,” she said of heroin users. “They could be the people cooking your breakfast in the morning or your bartender, and you would never know.”

The act of reporting can even claim its own toll. In Rio Arriba County, where I started my reporting career, one of the reporters who worked at the small but mighty Rio Grande Sun following my tenure ended up in the throes of addiction himself. He did the important work of documenting overdoses and abuse.

One morning, early last year, I spied a nice-sized ball of black tar in the police department's evidence room. Police had seized it during the bust-up of a fencing operation the night before. I caught a whiff of its nasty, vinegary odor and couldn't stop thinking about how much I had enjoyed using the stuff years earlier.


By then we had been crushing painkillers on and off for several months. A couple Sarah met at work had turned us on to them and, before even realizing it, we would hurt for the candy, as it was called. It wasn't long before the pills no longer hit like they used to, with the first casualty being Sarah's grades.

Tragically, Sarah later died as a result of an overdose. If communities truly want to confront the realities that produce labels like "heroin capital," they are better off digging into stories like Sarah's than arguing about statistics.

General Interest Review 00021

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is a historian and activist who died today. As one of the leading voices on the Leftmost side of the national conscience over the past 50 years, Zinn's life is the rare snapshot of the public intellectual, so scarce in the recent American past. His obituary did not appear in the print edition of The New York Times on Jan. 28, 2009. Customarily, obituaries of major figures appear in newspapers the day following their death. (The paper of record featured obituaries of an astronomer, and, perhaps fittingly, a man known for chronicling New York's high society)

He gained fame from a book, "A People's History of the United States," which presented American history from the point of view of its most marginalized and oppressed. When people learned about these other characters in history, they began to question the motives of the leaders who were so frequently held up as heroes in the history normally taught in school. They were no longer hapless bystanders to injustice, nor were they saviors from oppression. Instead, they were willing participants in both enterprises. Like Zinn, people began to feel uneasy about leaders' actions. It presented an entirely new and different way of looking at the world. People were inspired.

Zinn looked through the lens of the oppressed often during his life. In the 1950s, he taught at Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Alabama. Around this time, the civil rights movement cropped up. And in the 1960s, he traveled to Hanoi during the Tet Offensive to negotiate the release of the first three American prisoners in the war. At this time, American officials refused to negotiate with The Enemy for the release of the prisoners. While Zinn talked, they ordered carpet bombing raids in the countryside. During this time, Zinn also spoke out against the war around the country and helped edit Daniel Ellsberg's leaked copy of the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers prior to publication.

The volume of activity is notable, but what made the tenacity of Zinn's actions somehow more forceful were that they came from a man who could easily be imagined as an unquestioning beneficiary of the postwar boom. Like your grandfather, he was a veteran, and was possessed of charm, a keen smile, and self-depecrating humor. But he could turn around and deliver a magnetic, impassioned speech that would bring lesser intellectual foes to their knees. People drew strength from Zinn because he believed what he said -- even though it was so radically different from anything else that other people say -- with every fiber of his being. Why else would such a nice guy spend so much time worrying about such depressing stuff?

On the Left, only a few leaders exist like him, and they are all getting on in years. And nice guys have always been hard to come by in the political/intellectual world. When you're able to simultaneously change the consciousness of people and inspire them through words and deeds, you're carrying a heavy load. The Left is hardly even a movement at this point, and people who want peace and an end to systemic injustice that have been marginalized by their own actions (worrying about 9/11 truth), and sheer dismissal from a mainstream that pays no attention to a peace mach but laps up every move of the other side's "extreme" wing. But Zinn was never all that popular with the mainstream press, and he never believed in conspiracies. Yet somehow there was still room for him in The Discourse. In the huge void left by Zinn's passing, the continuation of his project seems very much a possibility, as long as people he inspired are willing to take up the cause.

King of Beef

The lines on the road were straight. As always. Running into oblivion. Carl stretched out in his chair, looked at the ceiling briefly. He let his eyes bulge, giving over for one precious second to the forces that made him thankful his truck didn’t come equipped with an eject button.
-Someday I’ll get to stop driving. Someday I’ll drive this thing into a cemetery, and I’ll leave it there. With my father. And it can all go back where it came from.
He forced his head against the back of the seat again. A minute later, the truck was on the side of the road and he was out of it. Stretching out before him was only the sky. It stretched on into gray. Black was too final. The stars splattered like silkworms.
Carl ran back and forth a couple times. He jumped up and down twice, and kicked the air. Then he yelled.
“Focccaaacccciiiiaaaaaa”
He had a bad habit of yelling words that were altogether foreign to him. The only way he knew them was from commercials. But they sounded good, much like the food in the ads. He knew that no one could hear him yell these big words. That gave him pleasure. That no one could tell him he was trying too hard, or ask him what the word meant.
“Gooooooooooooorganzooooooooooooooooooola”
Items from The Olive Garden had a special release. Perhaps because he’d never been there. He took pleasure in that, too.
He got back in his truck. Started it on the second try. Yellow lines stretched on. He tried to follow them as the big rigs passed him by. Country music became boring after the fifth Alan Jackson tune about being down home.
-He never says nothing about how trapped that huge stretch of land can make you feel. That’s what country music should be about. But they don’t like to admit the bad in it.
The public access station in Deming replaced it Tonight there was some crank mumbling about aliens and Roswell and secret cities under the desert.
-At least he believes what he’s saying. More than you can say, right Alan?
He wished for a turn. Just a little shrug in the road to make him feel like putting his hands on the wheel was necessary. That there was some skill in driving. He saw the flask in the corner of his eye.
-Leave it alone, Carl.
The wind picked up, and some of the hay in the bed started to blow away. He followed it in the rearview mirror, piece by piece. He could count the money he was losing, piece by piece. To the cent. The radio piped in.
“There’s a recession on, and they know it, too. It makes them happy to see us fail.”
The flask looked a little better.
-Leave it alone.
The truck crashed through a fence, and a headlight was out. Dust was streaking behind the truck, and soon he couldn‘t even tell the hay from the cloud. Four bails dropped off the top of the load. He watched them float away, in the rearview mirror.
As morning approached, he ran through herds of cattle. For the most part they moved out of his way. He yelled out the window as he approached the herds, relishing in the role he‘d dreamed of himself in since birth.
“I’m the KIIIIIIIIIIIING OF BEEEEEF”
Most of the herd scattered away, afraid for their life. A few others looked back at him, stern and somber. Daring him to run them over. He remembered that they were alive. How many he’d raised and slaughtered over the years by his own hand.
“I’M THE KING!”
In the rearview mirror a piece of hay was floating. He ran square into a bull.
Carl thought about driving on. That cattle could take care of themselves.
But he got out, probably because he knew cattle. Their slow movements carried with them the weight of thought and grace. Something seemed right about that.
That was a thought he had years ago. Now he and the bull stared each other straight in the eyes.
“I’M. THE. KING.”
The bull grunted. Its breath was thick in the vague morning light. It fell to its knees, laid there. Carl could sense it probably wouldn’t die, but he didn’t want to see anymore of it.
He looked away from the bull long enough to eye his flask. He unscrewed the top. Emptied the whole thing on the bull. Lit a match. The thing went up in flames.
Jumping from side to side, he waved his arms and clicked his heel. He seemed to fan the fire with each swipe of his arms.
“HOOOLLLLLLLLLAAANNNNNNDDDDDDDAIIIIIIIIISSSSSE”
As the dawn broke, the blazed scorched the same color as the sun.
Carl noticed half his hay was gone. He was happy to be off the road

General Interest Review 00020

Travels in Georgia

"Travels in Georgia" is a magazine profile of Atlanta-based ecologist Carol Ruckdeschel, written by John McPhee. The New Yorker first published the piece in 1973. The piece simultaneously makes time stand still and seems to speed it mercilessly forward at breakneck pace.

The main narrative freezes time in its tracks, forcing the modern reader to look back and ponder what it might've been like. In following Ruckdeschel and her colleague, Sam Candler, McPhee provides an account of a final moment when parts of the area surrounding Atlanta, and even the city itself, remained wild. This was a time before most wetlands were drained to make way for Sun Belt expansion. Ruckdeschel and Candler filter the transition through their own lens. Roadkill is for dinner, and the shack-like house is full of wild animals. The swamp is hallowed ground. Perhaps the wetlands and wild areas will be a shadow of their former selves, but somehow nature and the people who are intertwined with it will remain as they ever were.

All the while, the story pushes quickly forward, having no trouble keeping the reader's eyes locked into the page. McPhee employs a masterful voice throughout that illuminates what makes the subject matter so dynamic without elevating it to mythic proportions. In his prose, there is room for both the morbid details of cooking up roadkill, and the philosophical points of the struggle to balance development with preservation of thriving ecosystems. Pine trees and birds speak, and so does Jimmy Carter's missed jump shot. McPhee spent countless hours traveling for the piece, and he seems to have left nothing out. And all of it is symbolic, telling, or at the very least elegantly described. If only the rest of life was so interesting, all of the stinking time.

General Interest Review 00019

Realism (international relations)

In the foreign policy realm, realism is a strand of thinking that leads states to act with only their own country in mind, even though the action is taking place outside their country. In the U.S., realist (so-called) policymakers have favored specific military initiatives that they claim will make the people living in the borders of the United States safer, and directly benefit the big picture foreign policy goals. Typically the realists have favored short-lived military offensives that have specific goals, but lead to miniscule gains in the abstract realm of security.

Under George H.W. Bush, realists Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell collaborated to kick the Iraqi military out of Kuwait. Few American casualties were recorded, Americans witnessed video of missiles and tanks, and virtually nothing changed in the Middle East in the Americans' favor save the protection of a substantial oil investment the U.S. had in the Kuwaiti emirate.

The realists also claimed a policy victory in the debate over what to do in the Iraq War under George W. Bush when the president opted for a surge strategy. The objective was to send a limited number of troops, wipe out the places where anti-American militants were operating, and get out. In practice, the strategy allegedly worked. But rather than being a pure product of American ingenuity, it was helped along by things that Iraqis did. Not least of these was the declaration of a cease fire by Shiite leader Moqtadh al-Sadr just as the troop increase occurred. American troops no doubt found it easier to clear anti-American forces from the slums of Baghdad when they weren't being fired on.

The security gains were again negligible. An opposition force created solely by the presence of American troops that fought solely on Iraqi soil and posed a civil security threat only because the huge military base outside Baghdad is technically American soil will eventually be stamped out when there are no American troops for them to oppose. There was little sign of the need for increased military action -- with all the attendant casualties, civilian and military.

Two years later, the realists appear to have struck a cord with their first non-Bush -- Barack Obama. The recent escalation of the American war in Afghanistan has all the realist hallmarks -- increased troop levels (30,000) for a specific amount of time (roughly 18 months) with a clear objective (to kick the Taliban and al Qaida out of Afghanistan). Like the Iraq surge, the success of the Afghanistan escalation depends on the Afghans virtually alone. In order to stamp out the Taliban and al Qaida, the U.S. expects the Afghan people to help oppose the Taliban through violence and viewpoint. Also expected is that the people will look for leadership in Kabul, distinct as one of the most corrupt governments in the world.

It is of course ironic that a realist strategy does not require the policymaker to be realistic. Before an audience of people all dressed exactly the same, Obama claimed that the Afghan election was marred by fraud, but went off in accordance with Afghan law. This is likely false, unless fraud is permitted in the Afghan constitution. Obama claimed the Taliban must be stamped out because they harbored al Qaida. In fact, al Qaida and the Taliban had a dicey relationship shaped mostly by proximity. Afghanistan's moon-like frontier makes it easy to hide, and the Taliban were too busy trying to control Afghanistan to worry about a bunch of crackpots hiding in their midst attempting to control the entire world.

Perhaps these are small corrections when so much human life is on the line. But once they are inserted, the argument for the necessity of this escalation crumbles. Armed with the facts, it would be obvious that the Taliban poses no threat to the people within the borders of the United States. They only want to be left alone. Even the threat posed from al Qaida is unlikely to be completely stamped out. They can simply run to the strikingly similar moonlike frontier in Pakistan, or, as they did in the late 90s when Sudan kicked them out, move their base of operations to another barren country with an unstable central government incapable of opposing their presence, or indifferent to it.

Realism is simply a moniker that interprets reality. If an academic never proposed that certain players act according to the realist model, Scowcroft and Gates would be called something else. Remaining would be the limited effects of their so-called restraint and the high human cost attached. It seems plenty of thinkers could end at a strategy that fills caskets while achieving zilch.