An amazing picture accompanies an interesting article on fetal surgery in the New York Times Magazine today. A tiny arm and hand of the unborn child reaches up toward a phsyician’s glove. The Times’ caption? “Dr. Joseph Bruner with Kelly Hasten’s uterus.” Talk about blinders.
WORSE THAN THE FRENCH: Satisfying article in the “Arts and Left-Wing Ideas” section of the New York Times yesterday. It features – guess what? – another glowing profile of a leftist academic. Only this time, she bites back! Julia Kristeva, a post-structuralist Freudian (ok, I’m trying to pin her down here), has long been an icon of the fascist academic left in the U.S. They have used Kristeva’s work to justify their racist, sexist and homophobic attacks on any minority individual who dares to actually think for herself. Now along comes Kristeva to say, to paraphrase Eliot, “that is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.” Surveying the wreckage American liberal racists have wrought with her work, she now insists: “What is important is not to affirm the power and identity of groups, but to increase the freedom of individuals … To assume a group identity is a dead end. And if some people have interpreted French thinking to mean they should, they are totally wrong.” Amen, sister.
The Dish 