Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [238]
In Baltimore, some teenagers already have: their candidate, yo, is a new gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun. As in Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt or Yo sucks at magic tricks. If yo sticks around—and if it spreads—maybe we can put the ever-awkward he or she to rest forever. And what would that mean? What consequences could that have for how we think about our world? Empirical question. Send in the psycholinguists.
2. From “Energy in the European Union, Gas Wars” in The Economist 390.8613 (January 10, 2009). (The Economist does not publish the names of the authors of its articles.)
Introduction:
A gas row between Russia and Ukraine has become a Christmas ritual. That may explain why, until this week, the European Union seemed to pay the latest tiff so little heed. Indeed, the people in Brussels talked of it as a normal bilateral commercial dispute in which the EU should neither interfere nor take sides. Yet Russia’s abrupt decision on January 5th to cut off almost all the gas it supplies to the EU countries via Ukraine has sharply raised the stakes, inviting the Europeans to intervene more directly. The shutdown should force a rethink of the EU’s overall energy policy as well.
Conclusion:
Beyond this, Europe needs to work harder to diversify its sources of energy, something that it must do anyway if it is to meet its ambitious climate-change targets. And it cannot be repeated too often that a fully liberalized energy market, with better linkages between countries, offers all of Europe not only a more efficient energy future but also a more secure one.
3. From Germaine Greer, “Beaten to the Punchline” in The Guardian (February 3, 2009). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/mar/02/germaine-greer-comedy-women]
Introduction:
I should probably not have said, in so few words on television recently, that women aren’t as funny as men. Put so baldly, the observation sounds like deliberate provocation, as if I was baiting feminists, or looking for some kind of a knee-jerk response. I was actually trying to present an aspect of the psychopathology of everyday life that strikes me as interesting and important. Women are at least as intelligent as men, and they have as vivid and ready a perception of the absurd; but they have not developed the arts of fooling, clowning, badinage, repartee, burlesque and innuendo into a semi-continuous performance as so many men have.
Conclusion:
At the heart of the judgment that women are not as funny as men is another far less inflammatory observation: that women are less competitive. Competition drives men to more and more outrageous and bizarre mental acrobatics, to stay ahead of the game and have the last laugh. The greater the pressure, the faster the firing of neurons in the male brain. You get your best results from women when you take the pressure off. Men do the inspired lunacy; women do droll.
4. From Robert Kagan, “Why the United States and Europe See the World Differently” in Policy Review 113 (2002). [http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3460246.html] Accessed March 10, 2009.
Introduction:
It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power—the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power—American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a selfcontained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion