RESPONSES TO MY JEWISH WORLD REVIEW COLUMN: Nine people wrote in to defend Wwasps programs. I asked the authors for permission to print their letters here. The ones below are the ones where I received that permission. My own (very brief) response follows in the next post. —————————————————————————————— I am a parent of a 15 year old son named Tony. Up to recently he was a student at the Academy At Dundee Ranch in Orotina, Costa Rica. He is now... Read more

VERY BRIEF RESPONSE RE WWASPS: Two parts: 1) I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this subject do a Nexis search for “wwasp” or, if you don’t have access to Nexis, at least check out the Observer piece here. Nexis will find for you a host of reports from a wide range of credible news sources–it isn’t just one biased reporter finding problems with Wwasps schools. 2) That said, even pretty bad “boot camp”-type programs can transform lives for the... Read more

BLOGROLL STUFF: Assuming I can edit my template, I will be adding/returning the Yale Free Press blog, Ishtar Talking (from Basra), Letter from Gotham, and Sed Contra. Read more

GLENN REYNOLDS’S ADVICE FOR THE DEMOCRATS is quite good–probably the best such compendium I’ve seen so far. Read more

THE PRIVATE LANGUAGES OF A LARGE FAMILY. Shamed says you need to have at least three children, “so there can be factionalism.” Read more

I COULD SLEEP FOR A THOUSAND YEARS: Fun piece in today’s Washington City Paper chronicling the countless uses of the “In [year X], sleepy, Southern Washington finally woke up and became a metropolitan city” cliche. Virtually identical language has been used to describe “awakenings” from 1865 through sometime in the late 1990s. Only flaw is that the piece doesn’t do much speculating on why this particular cliche has attached itself to my hometown. Possibilities include: D.C. is always sleepier than... Read more

THE BIRTH OF BLELVIS: Julian Sanchez learns the origin of D.C.’s Black Elvis. Read more

IN WAKE OF PROTESTS, TWO OFFICIALS RESIGN IN HONG KONG. Via Hit & Run. …The resignations of Regina Ip, the secretary of security, and Antony Leung, the financial secretary, represent a very public humiliation for Beijing because the two had the reputation of enjoying particularly close ties to top communist officials. Mrs. Ip was widely seen as Beijing’s enforcer, sending police and immigration officers to perform sometimes politically controversial raids. Mr. Leung is a former student radical who married Fu... Read more

FAMILIES LIVE IN FEAR OF MIDNIGHT CALL BY US PATROLS. Via Electrolite. …Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F). …One of the most disturbing incidents concerns Sufiyan Abd al-Ghani, 11, who was with his uncle in a car that was stopped near his home in Hay al-Jihad at just after 10pm on May 27.... Read more

IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS ON INSTAPUNDIT, here’s a very useful roundup of a) military bloggers in the general Iraq area, and b) Iraqi bloggers. Includes Ishtar, a new one to me, a woman blogging from Basra. Read more