Cottleston Pie

There's an excellent (not short) piece nominally about the current President of Harvard University, but I thought it captured a much more interesting discussion wherein the President simply stars as an excellent protagonist for the purpose of examining other topics. There's the abutment of between an academic rigor that has no need to bow to ego or couch results or observations in cushy, non-offensive language and the reality of life among humans who are easily offended. It could be called a discussion of "style versus substance" but is not about pitting them against each other as much as discovering how much style is appropriate to allow people to recognize the substance without closing their minds by offending or hiding the substance (assuming there is some) in so much fluff as to make it unrecognizable. I think this comes up at many people's job often. The article also touches on the topic of the place of Universities for doing meaningful public service as part of their mission, particularly research towards solving real problems. The Article

On a lighter note, there's a short article about how the movies have presented the afterlife, with a quick rundown of various cinematic portrayals. "Surprisingly, most afterlife movies seek to affirm the supreme and enduring power of love after the soul leaves the body — in sharp contrast to the real world, where love often can't survive a 10-minute walk around the block with the dog. " Myself, I think the Beetlejuice portrayal best, but maybe I'm overly swayed by the presence of Winona, who is unlikely to spend a whole lot of time standing on cotton balls and eating marshmallows. Speaking of substance versus fluff, this is pretty much all fluff. :-)
The Article