May 18, 1996

A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work. The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.

The Whitman administration released its long-awaited school financing plan today, saying it wants to increase state spending on education by $235 million so that local districts can meet new curriculum standards without resorting to higher property taxes. Almost two-thirds of the state's 595 districts would receive more aid, while 146 would get less under the plan, including the state-controlled district of Newark, where support would be cut $30.5 million, or 6.6 percent of its budget.

By the day in late April when Senator Bob Dole called in his Presidential campaign manager to disclose that he had decided to resign from the Senate after discussions with his wife, Elizabeth, the Senate majority leader was under siege. The usually deft Mr. Dole had been caught off-guard the day before when a chance remark to reporters -- that he and President Clinton should negotiate the budget face-to-face -- was quickly elevated by the White House into a political duel. His Republican colleagues in the Senate had helped hand Mr. Dole a defeat on his own legislation, an amendment to a health care insurance bill.

Few countries honor their gods the way Turkey reveres Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose military skills and authoritarian hand reassembled parts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire and fashioned them into the modern Turkish state. Fifty-eight years after his death, Ataturk's cool blue eyes stare down from the walls of every public building in Turkey, and statues of him dominate thousands of central squares. Here in Ankara, the capital, his mausoleum displays a sublime arrogance that even Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, never achieved.

Valujet's Problem History