Intellectual

Despite all our techno-ingenuity, "dumbth" continues to spread. This is Steve Allen's term for the long-running epidemic of intellectual laziness and the official sanctioning of the slipshod. National surveys keep reminding us how many students cannot read, write, or apply whatever concepts they do manage to retain. In 17 years of teaching college, I've witnessed a steady deterioration in academic skills and interest and a growing reliance on quilting. Students scoop other peoples' ideas off the Web and stitch them into clumsy patchworks they mistake for term papers.

A $5,300 reward is being offered for tips that lead to the homecoming of James White, an intellectually disabled 64-year-old man who left his Owings Mills assisted-living home a month ago. White, who is black, 5 feet 7 inches tall and 186 pounds, left his group home in the 9200 block of Leigh Choice Court on Feb. 26. White was last seen between 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m., after which time staff found the front door open. White's sisters, Rosanna Miles of Rosedale and Addie Bagley of Baltimore, urged the public to provide police with any information.

The Emperor's Children By Claire Messud A robust, canny and surprisingly searching novel told with a light-handed irony that is, by turns, as measured as Edith Wharton's and as cutting as Tom Wolfe's. Messud, in her fourth novel, selected as one of the best of 2006 by many reviewers, is wickedly observant of pretensions - intellectual, sexual, class and gender.

It is long past time to question the appalling intellectual dishonesty that has led us to kill 55 million children through abortion in the past 40 years. We must, as a matter of justice, find better solutions to difficult pregnancies. Civilized societies thrive through smart, creative, generous, life-giving and just solutions to their difficulties. Civilized societies do not kill children as a solution to any problem, no matter how grave. No society can claim to be just while legally killing its own children in the name of "choice.

Washington Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. chose him. So did former presidential aide Hamilton Jordan, ABC news chief Roone Arledge, Education Secretary Richard W. Riley, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda and columnist Robert Novak.Not to mention King Baudouin of Belgium.The list is long, populated by the famous and the ordinary -- scared men with prostate cancer who passed up the most skilled hands in their hometowns for the specialist heralded as the nation's best."I knew there was a great surgeon at Hopkins -- Dr. Patrick Walsh," said Jordan, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter who traveled to Johns Hopkins Hospital from Atlanta last fall to have Walsh remove his cancerous prostate.

PARIS -- A fascinating book called ''A Dictionary of French Intellectuals'' has just been published in France, filled with information not only on individuals but on what the editors (Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock) call ''the moments'' and ''the places'' crucial to the intellectual in France since the 19th century.Intellectuals are ordinarily thought not to exist in the United States or England. Among us, the term is employed, if at all, with an edge of embarrassment, as if to claim to be an intellectual were vaguely decadent, or un-American, or unmanly (which would seem to exempt female intellectuals but does not)

La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Chatelet Judith P. Zinsser Viking / 400 pages / $24.95 For the past six years, the Bush administration has been almost obsessively anti-science, causing many intellectuals as well as scientists to yearn for the focus on rationality and empiricism that was the keystone of the Enlightenment. There are few more thrilling periods than the Enlightenment and there were few more exciting places to be than France in the Age of Reason. Not since the Greeks had philosophy aspired to such a glorious apex.

WASHINGTON - Amid the war and nonstop media coverage of the past two weeks, our country lost a giant figure in American politics. Pat Moynihan was a close friend and former colleague. He was a member of my generation, now a disappearing generation, who possessed perhaps the most respected mind of anyone I have known in public life. The former senator and U.N. ambassador from New York was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday afternoon in a relatively quiet ceremony. As has been noted in the many tributes this past week, Pat was an American original - one-of-a-kind.

Washington. -- Some may dismiss Irving Howe as something of a dinosaur, for he believed deeply in the currently unfashionable doctrine of socialism. Yet, to describe him as a socialist intellectual is like describing Michael Jordan as a Chicago basketball player.Mr. Howe, who died May 5 of heart disease at age 72, added a richness to the game, a show-stopping nuance that can quickly be grasped and appreciated even by those who are unfamiliar with the rules.Through his editing of the leftist opinion journal Dissent, his warmly narrated book ''World of Our Fathers,'' about the Eastern European Jewish migration to America, and the dozens of other essays and books he wrote on literature, culture and politics, he displayed an impressive moral and intellectual steadiness.

As Cary Grant never said: Jodie, Jodie, Jodie.Here she is, star, producer, America's sweetheart, double Oscar winner, Yale honors grad, legendary object of a failed assassin's ardor, all of 32. How much intelligence, talent, power and beauty can be jammed into one small package? Surely, when you're approaching Jodie Foster, you're getting pretty close to the limit.And it is a small package: lissome and dynamically intelligent, Foster is much less prepossessing in person than on screen, where the camera magically magnifies her presence and lovingly charts the delicate geometry of her bone structure.

Terry Musika, an accountant and expert witness who worked in business fraud and patent damages claims, died of pancreatic cancer Dec. 18 at his Hunt Valley home. He was 64. The co-founder of Invotex, a Fells Point business, he was a legal economics expert in lawsuits involving corporate giants Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung. He also immersed himself in Baltimore legal affairs and testified in numerous local cases. "He was considered one of the top intellectual property damages experts in the country," said a colleague, Debbie Pavlik, his firm's marketing manager.

Hundreds of computers, monitors, office furniture and digital design tools were auctioned Tuesday in Timonium to raise money for creditors of defunct Big Huge Games and its Rhode Island parent company, 38 Studios LLC. Traces of a one-time creative environment remained on the fifth floor of a Timonium office building, as people bid on hundreds of video games, game consoles, pingpong and pool tables, and stereo and audio equipment. "This was a great place to work," quipped Matt Greenberg, a Baltimore County resident who was looking to buy furniture.

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal editorial "Why Not Paul Ryan?" made the case for his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in this statement: "Romney can win a big election over big issues. He'll lose a small one. " After Mr. Ryan's serious proposal to restructure Medicare -- which virtually everyone knows must be reformed -- the response from Democrats was an unserious TV ad, which showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair over a cliff. If Messrs.

UPDATE: See end of post for update on another journalist saying Zakaria "borrowed heavily" from him. Following the lead of Time magazine, CNN Friday suspended Sunday morning show host and international affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria for plagiarism. The magazine said its suspension was for a month "pending further review," while CNN put no time limit on its removal of Zakaria from its airwaves. Plagiarism used to be a deadly journalistic sin from which there often was no redemption.  Given the lack of values and ethics in journalism today, however, who knows what will happen to Zakaria.

I am a proud product of the Baltimore City public school system. My high school years at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute prepared me exceptionally well for the rigorous academic studies that led to a career in medicine, health policy and economics, and now higher education. Unfortunately, my education in Baltimore during the 1970s contrasts sharply with the experience of many urban students across America who are mired in underperforming K-12 school systems that poorly prepare them for higher education and the world of opportunities beyond.

With the Republican presidential nomination contest in high gear, Marylanders might be forgiven for smiling. The word "snob" has returned with full force to presidential politics after a four-decade hiatus. Former Sen. Rick Santorum (Penn State University '80, University of Pittsburgh '81, Dickinson School of Law '86), in an old-fashioned beat-down on higher education, recently informed us that President Barack Obama is "a snob" for wanting Americans to go to college, where they would be indoctrinated by "some liberal college professor.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson, meet Ronald Ernest Paul. He is the very soul of a foolish consistency. Meaning that he is willing, often to a fault, to follow his ideology to its logical and most extreme conclusions. In this, the congressman differs from other GOP contenders for the White House and, for that matter, from most politicians, period. Your average pol might rail against the intrusion of government into the private lives of its citizens, then turn right around and advocate a law regulating what a gay man does in his bedroom - and see no contradiction.

"Wrong Turn at Lungfish" gives us a premise right out of a television sitcom: Gum-popping New York bimbo volunteers to read to blind, dying college professor and winds up teaching him things about life he never learned back in Metaphysics 101.On one level, "Lungfish" is quite the cute comedy."Want to come down here next to me?" says the young woman, suggesting a more comfortable position for the man as she reads."Physically, yes," he answers. "Intellectually, not without scuba gear."But for all the "Simonized" yuks, the Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz play currently in production at Colonial Players of Annapolis goes beyond the formulaic mismatching of social types to become a sad, intense, affecting piece of drama.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson, meet Ronald Ernest Paul. He is the very soul of a foolish consistency. Meaning that he is willing, often to a fault, to follow his ideology to its logical and most extreme conclusions. In this, the congressman differs from other GOP contenders for the White House and, for that matter, from most politicians, period. Your average pol might rail against the intrusion of government into the private lives of its citizens, then turn right around and advocate a law regulating what a gay man does in his bedroom - and see no contradiction.