Reporters Without Borders reports that 2005 was a brutal year for journalists; 63 journalists and five media assistants were killed, while 1,308 were assaulted or threatened. Iraq, where 24 journalists and five media assistants were killed, was the most treacherous location for journalists, having claimed the lives of 76 journalists and media assistants since the beginning of the conflict there in March of 2003.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Much of the progressive left in America believes that the state should not legislate on sexuality.  Because we cannot all agree on what is moral, it is a private concern.  In this sense it is an anti-moral position.  Being pro-choice relies on a similar argument.  Because we do not all agree on when life begins, the state should back away and let individuals make up their own minds.  In the broadest sense, these are applications and extensions of the historic liberal argument for the separation of church and state.  Where there is disagreement on morals and no individual is being harmed by another, the state should not impose one view.  This logic is part of a grand tradition associated with John Locke.

Most of the left also believes that diversity in the population is broadly good.  This can be purely for aesthetic reasons.  New York City is simply more exciting than Topeka.  (I know this from personal experience.)  However, this argument can be taken further.  The claim can be made that diversity is necessary to a basic freedom to develop ourselves as individuals in the way that we desire.  For this freedom to be meaningful, there must be options.  Were everyone the same, there would no longer be any choice.  This is an elaboration on principles articulated most artfully by John Stuart Mill.

A principled libertarian would be unlikely to take issue with these ideas.  Progressives would also want to agree.  Unfortunately, they would be wrong.

True diversity implies disagreements on moral questions.  The liberal solution is to make these private rather than public.  As diversity increases, this necessarily means that the range of public morality decreases.  One can imagine the conclusion — it becomes impossible to impose any morality at all.  This seems fine for the left when the question is one of gay rights.  However, there is no reason to stop there.  Why should the broader society be responsible for helping the unfortunate?  This is a moral position as well.

The contemporary left approaches this in two ways.  The most common is to press for state support of their particular progressive beliefs.  This contradicts the first principle, as many individuals are forced to support with their taxes a morality they do not agree with.  The second is to reduce diversity.  In other words, make everybody a progressive.  Perhaps effective propaganda could make the entire country into Cambridge or the Upper West Side.  But what would happen to our freedom of choice then?

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma.  What appears to be happening in the United States is a slow but steady erosion of the possibility of public morality.  One might celebrate the decline of the repressive establishment.  But nothing has replaced it.  The right responds to the vacuum by trying to eliminate the church/state separation, reduce diversity, and prevent the ascension of the progressive ideal.  The basic contradictions in progressive politics makes this battle difficult to fight.  Without new ideas of politics and society, it seems unlikely that it can be won.

Pete DeWan

Pennsylvania residents earlier voted out all of the school board members who supported the decision that public schools be forced to present “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Yesterday the new Dover Area School Board, bolstered by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s decision that intelligent design is a religious — and not a scientific — concept, threw out the policy to introduce intelligent design in science classrooms.

Intelligent design, in its simplest terms, is a theory that questions the legitimacy of evolution and suggests the universe has been formulated, in all its complexity, by a higher power.  U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the previous school board desired “to promote religion in the public school classroom,” in clear violation of the principle of the separation of church and state.

Mimi Hanaoka

There will be no more Playboy. Or at least no more Playboy as we know it, sort of; the magazine is now concocting plans to launch an Indian edition, complete with models and pin ups who will be clothed to suit Indian norms and laws.

Apparently nobody reads Playboy for the articles anymore, and few Americans even read the magazine at all; in 2004 magazine sales shrank one percent domestically, while sales rose by 13 percent abroad. The magazine’s parent company’s primary sources of revenue are extra-literary — video games, porn, DVDs, television, and the like. The answer, then, is to sell overseas, and with approximately 200 million people reading magazines, India should be a prime target. Except that India bans having or peddling goods of “lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest,” barring material that can be redeemed by virtue of its value as art, literature, or religious content. And Playboy, as we know it, certainly fails all three of those criteria.

So what will Playboy look like without its signature nude playmates? Playboy Enterprises’ Chief Executive Christie Hefner stated that the Indian magazine, which may not even be called Playboy, “would be an extension of Playboy that would be focused around the lifestyle, pop culture, celebrity, fashion, sports and interview elements of Playboy.”

The idea is, apparently, that sex doesn’t haven’t to be American, or even western, to sell. Good luck, Playboy.

Mimi Hanaoka

Woody Allen films have conveniently fallen into one of two categories — the humorous, character-driven, self-mocking comedies and the serious, character-driven, life-mocking dramas.  Only a few have achieved an adroit balance of both, and those have come to be his greatest films: Oscar-winners Annie Hall and Hannah and her Sisters.  His latest film, Match Point, joins those two films in the upper tier of Mr. Allen’s cinematic repertoire and is one of the best films of 2005.

Match Point’s theme centers on the belief that luck plays an important role in life and one never knows which way that luck will go — good or bad.  The key to this film’s success lies with the excellent cast — smartly deprived of the tried and true neurotic Woody — who play off each other like a tightly choreographed Gilbert & Sullivan operetta directed by Ingmar Bergman.  Leading the cast is a subdued but chillingly charming performance by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Bend It Like Beckham) as one-time tennis pro Chris Wilton, who by shear luck enters the world of London’s upper crust by letting the daughter of a wealthy industrialist fall in love with him.  The genius of the character, from both a written and performance standpoint, is the fact that Chris doesn’t intentionally try to weasel into a better life — it just happens, and he actually falls in love with the daughter, Chloe.  The only obstacle to Chris’ lucky situation comes in the form of a voluptuous American actress named Nola (Scarlett Johansson), the fiancée of Chloe’s brother Tom (Matthew Goode), who was the first to befriend Chris while seeking tennis lessons.  Nola neither tries to encourage Chris’ lust for her nor tries perpetuate what becomes an unfortunate affair.  

Match Point could have easily turned into a melodramatic family soap opera in the hands of a lesser-experienced writer-director, but Mr. Allen so deftly lets his actors naturally unfold the characters’ lives within the context of the story that it all feels organic and believable.  But what elevates this film isn’t the Greek tragedy you’re expecting but a right turn during the end of the second act that takes the film in a whole other direction.  Without spilling the beans, I can say it is quite thrilling.

Johansson is sexy and vulnerable, sad and hopeful, all at once but without outshining the rest of the cast.  Goode, while taking a bit of Hugh Grant and a touch of Rupert Everett, gives a vision of a 21st-century British rich kid who you wouldn’t mind being your best friend.  Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton play the parents like a privileged-class Stiller and Meara, with subtly amusing exchanges providing just the right amount of comic relief.  Chloe is the clueless plain Jane who can’t believe she snagged the cute jock, but the way Emily Mortimer plays her, you never feel sorrow or envy towards the character. The best kudos go to Rhys-Meyers who plays Chris like a poor kid in a candy store who can’t believe he’s surrounded by goodies but also can’t quite enjoy them until he’s told he’s allowed to indulge himself.

Mr. Allen deserves a lot of credit for writing a superb screenplay full of pathos, charm, and tragedy and is one of the few films of 2005 to make you ponder the particulars of life in a very engaging manner.  Match Point is one of the year’s best mature films, combining drama and humor elements in a simple but unique way.  Match Point is in theaters now.

Rich Burlingham

U.S. government tallied 844 American servicemen and women killed in Iraq in 2005, upping the total killed in since the conflict officially erupted in March of 2003 to 2,178.  The number of Americans wounded during the same period is 15,955. Iraq Body Count puts the number of Iraqi deaths at about 30,000 since the war began in 2003.

Mimi Hanaoka

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was riding my moped from the outskirts of Boston back to Cambridge.  My father had just called to make sure that I was no longer in New York City.  I stopped to see the burning World Trade Center on a 40-inch flat-screen television in a storefront display.  The rest of that day was a nightmare of trying to find my girlfriend across the overloaded cellular circuits of New York.

Like everyone, fear filled me those next few nights and days.  Repeated calls and emails finally got a response from an Egyptian-American friend of mine, who told me what was happening to her in New York City: “A kid that was a friend of the family was stabbed to death in Bay Ridge and another girl was stabbed, but she managed to survive. Two of my aunts have been harassed and their scarves were pulled off their heads. My mother has remained home since the incident … and as we were in the mosque on 96th, there was a bomb threat and everyone was evacuated.  It’s been a real shocking experience that has just caused me to be in a state of disbelief.”

With this on my mind, I began graduate school and soon was pursuing the research that would end up being my dissertation, an exploration of the experiences of Muslims in America.  Initially, I thought that the situation would be far more dire than I eventually learned.  As the research has progressed, I have become more and more optimistic.

I had planned to write this in a non-academic setting.  Unfortunately, Spencer Ackerman has beaten me to the punch.  His piece is well worth reading, and my research has led me to agree broadly with his conclusions.  However, one thing missing from his work is the fear that so many Muslims felt and continue to feel.  

What is striking about the Muslim response to this fear is how they are able to maintain optimism about their future in America.  The key to this is crucial to the experience of Muslims in America, and quite different from Western Europe.  Our long history of immigration has been colored by many negative incidents, for Chinese, Irish, Italians, and finally and most awfully, the internment of Japanese Americans.  Those of us on the political left often tend to fixate on the negative qualities of America, making it easy to forget just how good America is at integrating immigrants.  

Today, what we see and what a Muslim immigrant sees, is that these were followed by slow acceptance and eventual success in American society.  This is an invaluable ideological resource.  The tribulations of today do not have to be the reality of tomorrow.  When the mosque is firebombed, when your cousin is assaulted, you know that this is just a passing phase.  Endure.  Even if it is no rainbow, at the end there will still be a pot of gold.  For so many of those I spoke with, their future in America shines so brightly that even the darkest corners of the present are illuminated with hope.

Pete DeWan

Since the kids won’t touch each other properly, don’t let them touch at all. Culver City Middle School acknowledges that its “no contact” policy, in which students are banned from any physical contact with one another, is written nowhere in the school’s documents but is nevertheless enforced. In an attempt to prevent bullying, brawls, and harassment among the school’s 1,739 students, the school forbids hugging, hand holding, and kissing on its premises. Is the program working?  Maybe. And sort of. Students complain about uneven enforcement of the rule, and as Paul Chung, UCLA assistant professor of pediatrics and staffer at the UCLA/Rand Center for Adolescent Health Promotion, states: “When you’re trying to extinguish a behavior, the trick is to be absolutely consistent so that every time the behavior is experienced, they get knocked down…. They know they’re never going to get away with it.”

It would be a boon if the unofficial “no touch” prescription eliminated harassment and bullying, but it seems to be coming at a sinister, in addition to somewhat inconsistent, price.  

Mimi Hanaoka