Author Archives: Benjamin Miller

The logic of language is exasperating beyond words. My patience for cliché is worn as thin as the ice of a mixed metaphor. I don’t give a whit for puns. Irony and sarcasm are exactly the same. The only believable statements are paradoxes. Word games are fun, but if it’s true that the limit of »

HEALTH CARE REFORM Did H.R. 3590 pass because we the people fought for it? Or because Obama and Pelosi did? We did. After the last 18 months of health care reform debate, I pray that I never again hear the words “shoved down our throats” applied to anything but zookeepers and unruly animals. For once, »

It was no “Miracle on Ice,” but Team USA turned a lot of heads on Sunday night when they defeated the Canadian men’s ice hockey team in a 5–3 upset. The Americans have won against Switzerland yesterday, and they are advancing to the Olympic semifinals — but if their match against Canada proved anything, it »

I couldn’t take it anymore. Forty-five minutes after my train ground to a halt just outside Boston, the little girl sitting two rows down from me had sung “It’s a Small World” so many times, Walt Disney would have strangled her. Desperate for a distraction, I reached for a tattered copy of “Arrive,” the official »

The Supreme Court may have given the green light on corporate spending for political campaigns, but Yale’s policy for funding student organizations is stalled out. The administration evidently has less faith in its own students’ financial prudence than our highest court does in corporate responsibility. According to the Universiy’s most recent financial report, Yale’s annual »

At this time of year, caught in winter’s breath, with snowdrifts lining the streets and rock salt staining our shoes, it can be hard to remember that the days are growing longer and springtime closer. The changing seasons remind us of history’s cycles and, on darker days, of Zarathustra’s eternal return. Powers wax and wane, »

A few days ago, I found myself sitting at a restaurant across the table from a girl I hardly knew. We all know the terror of the first date; when conversation stops, discomfort settles in. Times like these remind me of the value of an Ivy-League education — I can always come up with something »

A pair of recent News pieces begin to outline the tensions plaguing post-9/11 American-Muslim relations. Joe Carlsmith (“Standing up for religion,” Nov. 13), toeing a tested but tired postmodernist line, urges us to recall that bloody religious history is not unique to Islam. Discussing the Fort Hood tragedy, he rightly observes that “a murderer killed »

Today marks the 404th anniversary of Guy Fawkes Night, perhaps the most perverse of all the holidays. Tonight, celebrating a terrorist’s failure to detonate barrels of gunpowder inside Parliament, people all across the former British Empire, well, detonate gunpowder. Fireworks, bonfires and burning effigies are all par for the course. And while the occasion ostensibly »

Ten months after President Obama’s inauguration, Americans have grown accustomed to having a black President. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity aside, race has slipped quite a few notches on the list of characteristics we associate with “that one.” Health care reformer and Nobel laureate both come to mind ahead of African-American. We move ever closer »

If you’re an undergraduate looking for a post-graduate life rife with intellectual stimulation, cosmopolitan thrill and upward mobility, you could do a lot worse than join a large management consulting firm. All the analytical skills, social awareness and productive efficiency you’ve developed over the last four years seem perfectly suited for the fast-paced life of »

At a recent town hall meeting in my home congressional district, Tennessee’s 4th, Rep. Lincoln Davis was caught between a rock and a hard place. A Democrat representing one of the country’s reddest regions, the NRA gives him an “A,” he strongly opposes abortion, and the Issues section of his Web site places “sportsmen’s rights” »