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Index: Noted elsewhere

Jenny McCarthy and the science majors at Google U.

As in England, increasing numbers of parents in the United States chose not to immunize their children—for measles, mumps, and rubella, and for other diseases, too. As in England, outbreaks of vaccinatable diseases have re-emerged as a public health problem.

· Bummed out by Skid Row research.

Just as in New York, it was a culture of lawlessness that had been tolerated for decades. If any of these researchers had bothered to go into the streets, they would have seen that.

· Richard Leacock’s camera made even going for lunch an adventure.

Leacock said no – and only agreed to stand in the hallway shooting through the open doorway to the suite: shooting Kennedy walking back-and-forth thinking, determined and vulnerable as the district-by-district vote-counts were broadcasting on the suite-TV.

· To hell with the blessed in heaven, says a deranged Dante.

For these medieval poets, whom I used to teach at Oxford, the central concerns of life were sex in general and girls in particular; they were likewise obsessed with God. Another preoccupation was a political one: wondering whether anyone would ever devise a decent method of organising human society.

· Cello, bow, Bach, Bailey, brief.

The cellist’s not playing the repeats tonight, and who could blame him? He dances us through each suite’s sturdy allemande, each suite’s svelte and arrogant courante, each suite’s sultry forbidden sarabande.

· The anxieties of attending the 2011 E-Poetry Festival.

I anticipated attending E-Poetry might bring apprehension, a type of crisis to my research — that a new slew of dynamics might be unleashed, deviating beyond contexts I consider for the genre. They did not.

· The last place to look for reason is in an Egyptian revolution.

Magada wants to unburden herself, release the anguish inside. But it must be to someone who can help her son. She sits silently, the weight of her loss left unspoken bearing down upon her as much as the pressure of the sun’s heat sears her neck draining her of energy and hope.

· It’s no secret that we’ve lost the will to guard our privacy.

In our days, it is not so much the possibility of betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but its opposite: shutting down the exits.

· Can there really be a pragmatism so perverted it’s practically useless?

Rorty had indeed revived pragmatism, but Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” is, by the Deweyans’ lights, a perverted and emaciated pragmatism, a pragmatism not worth resuscitating.

· Those were the days, when prostitutes dreamed of the presidency and preachers pushed abortions.

Victoria Woodhull was quite a gal. Having once been an actress and prostitute in Gold Rush San Francisco, she moved on to New York and was ‘reborn’, becoming the first female broker on Wall Street, then founding her very own newspaper to promote her political dream – which was to stand for the presidency in 1872, fighting under the banner of suffrage, free love and equal rights for all.

· The downside of freelance espionage. (Yes, there is a downside.)

On paper you were the perfect candidate and you were sure that you’d land a job in the National Clandestine Service and be making dead drops, dangling moles, using active doubles (and passive doubles) and working some highly anticipated honeypot missions. It turned out that being too perfect on paper is a red flag.

· George Orwell, out of the whirlpool and safe on dry land.

Returning from one of those excursions with his little son, nephew, and niece, he had to cross the notorious Corryvreckan whirlpool—one of the most dangerous whirlpools in all British waters.

President Obama’s ‘special relationships’ – wherever he may roam.

President Obama: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”

· What happened to the ‘man of letters’? Ask George Steiner.

The man of letters — and what was George Orwell, if he was not a man of letters, what was Edmund Wilson, whom I succeeded on The New Yorker twenty-seven years ago? — the man of letters has become very suspect.

· Mrs Yeats and her husband, old and grey.

You have had no love affairs of consequence. When Yeats, a 51-year-old bachelor, once again proposes to Maud Gonne (the Irish actress and political activist with whom he’d fallen in love as a young man), she declines. When Yeats then proposes to Maud’s daughter, Iseult, she also declines; Iseult would later have an affair with Pound. A month later, when Yeats proposes to you, you accept. At 11:20 in the morning on October 20, 1917, you are married in the Harrow Road Registry Office; the witnesses are Pound and your mother.