From Esquire:

If you smoke, 
I can smoke, right?

Be my guest. If you're gonna smoke anything else, we'll bring in 
the incense.

I brought a miniature joint, but I'm not thrusting it upon 
you. I just thought it would be wrong to meet you and not bring a little something.

Well, then, let's get into this thing and see. We might want to take a break.

I don't want to put you in any kind of position.

Absolutely not. I've been in every position possible, and I've always gotten out of it.

How are you holding up on the [Stones] tour?

I can handle the show. In the '60s, it was 20 minutes, in and out. Now it's two hours. I don't come off as exhausted 
as I used to ten years ago, 
because I've learned more about how to pace a show. I don't think about the physical aspects—I just expect it all to work. I'm blessed physically 
with stamina. The frame's still holding. I eat the same as I 
always have. Meat and potatoes, basically, with a nice bit of fish now and again. My wife tries to force more salad down me, but I'd rather take the pill.

More here.

The Association of Man and Woman
.

Whatever badness there was,

sometimes
was not of us
but between us.

Because there was goodness,
which felt like a sure base.
While badness felt only
like incidents upon it.

The badness was only
the way you and I needed to behave,

sometimes.
Not what we were.

The badness was only
the small,
transient,
insignificant
pain,
like the tiny, instant
pain
from the prick of a rose’s thorn,
taking joy,
for a second,
away from the fragrance of the rose.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
published by Hybrid Nation
.

Massimo Pigliucci in Scientia Salon:

This is my third essay on what has become an informal series on socially relevant false dichotomies (the first one was on “trigger warnings” [1], the second one on Islamophobia [2]). On this occasion I’m going to focus again on nature-nurture [3], perhaps the motherlode of false dichotomies (as well as my area of technical expertise as a practicing biologist [4]).

The occasion is provided by recent controversies concerning the delicate concepts of gender and race, where once again — as in both the cases of trigger warnings and of Islamophobia — I see well intentioned progressives needlessly (in my mind) and harshly attacking fellow progressives, or at the least, people who ought to be their natural political allies. (As in the other two cases, I will ignore contributions from the right and from libertarians, on the ground that I find them both less constructive and less surprising than those from the sources I will be discussing here.)

Let me start with gender. I read with fascination a New York Times op-ed piece by feminist Elinor Burkett entitled “What makes a woman?” [5] explaining why a number of feminists have issues with certain aspects of the transgender movement, and in particular why Burkett had mixed feelings about the very public coming out of Caitlyn Jenner [6].

More here.

Emma Young in Mosaic:

We don’t think of ourselves as being particularly good smellers, especially compared with other animals. But research shows that smells can have a powerful subconscious influence on human thoughts and behaviour. People who can no longer smell – following an accident or illness – report a strong sense of loss, with impacts on their lives they could never have imagined. Perhaps we don’t rank smell very highly among our senses because it’s hard to appreciate what it does for us – until it’s gone.

Nick, who’s 34, can pinpoint the moment he lost his sense of smell. It was 9 January 2014. He was playing ice hockey with friends on the frozen pond at his parents’ place in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. “I’ve done it millions of times,” he says. “I was skating backwards, slowly, and I hit a rut on the ice. My feet went out from under me. I hit the back right side of my head. I was out.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Padaemonium:

I took part on Friday in a debate on ‘The state of free expression after Charlie Hebdo‘ at the Wilderness Festival, with Anshuman Mondal and Tahmima Anam. It was a good debate, but frustratingly short. I agreed with virtually all the issues raised by Tahmima Anam (her main argument, from the perspective of a Bangladeshi-born writer, was that the state is amore dangerous threat to free speech than extremist groups.) But Anshuman Mondal (‘There is almost nothing that Kenan and I agree on’, as he himself put it in the debate’) raised many points to which I would have liked to respond, but had not the time. So, let me pick up here two of the issues he raised.

The problem with the free speech debate, Mondal suggested, is that it has become polarized between those who are for and against free speech when in fact the debate about freedom is much more difficult. Freedom, he suggested, is ‘not a straightforward issue’; One cannot simply be ‘for or against freedom’. Nor can one see freedom merely as an ‘absence of restrictions’. It is also about the ‘assumption of responsibilities’.

I wonder if Mondal would have made the same argument 200 years ago during the debate about the abolition of slavery? ‘Freedom is not a straightforward issue. One cannot simply be for or against the abolition of slavery. We have to be more nuanced in the way we look upon the issue. We cannot simply see it as a matter of an absence of restrictions. Those being offered freedom have to accept their responsibilities too.’

More here.

Edward Carr in More Intelligent Life:

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.” “To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each person.” Djerassi is right to be suspicious of flitting. We all know a gifted person who cannot stick at anything. In his book “Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture” Stefan Zweig describes an extreme case:

[Casanova] excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church when he was not yet 16 years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theatre. When he was 18 he became doctor of laws at the University of Padua—though down to the present day the Casanovists are still disputing whether the degree was genuine or spurious…He was well informed in chemistry, medicine, history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative (because perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy…As universal dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will, resolution, patience.

Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest living polymaths of the polygamous sort—doers, not dabblers. One test I imposed was breadth. A scientist who composes operas and writes novels is more of a polymath than a novelist who can turn out a play or a painter who can sculpt. For Djerassi, influence is essential too. “It means that your polymath activities have passed a certain quality control that is exerted within each field by the competition. If they accept you at their level, then I think you have reached that state rather than just dabbling.” They mentioned a score of names—Djerassi was prominent among them. Others included Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Michael Frayn and Oliver Sacks.

More here.

Walter Isaacson in The New York Times:

Walker Percy had a theory about hurricanes. “Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case,” he wrote of Will Barrett, the semi-autobiographical title character of his second novel, “The Last Gentleman.” “Take hurricanes, for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one. It was his impression that not just he but other people felt better in hurricanes.” Percy was a medical doctor who didn’t practice and a Catholic who did, which equipped him to embark on a search for how we mortals fit into the cosmos. Our reaction to hurricanes was a clue, he believed, which is why leading up to the 10th anniversary of Katrina, it’s worth taking note not only of his classic first novel, “The Moviegoer,” but also of his theory of hurricanes as developed in “The Last Gentleman,” “Lancelot” and some of his essays.

…Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called “the malaise,” a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached. As Percy put it in “The Moviegoer,” “The malaise has settled like a fallout and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall.” The heroes of his books, each in his own way, embark on a search for the cause and cure of this syndrome. “What is the nature of the search?” wonders Binx Bolling, the narrator of “The Moviegoer.” “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” A real-world crisis can provide a respite from the malaise.

More here.

The Final Change
.

Being blind,
the fundamental thing my sister could not tolerate,
was change.
If her panic-fluttering fingers,
groping ahead in apprehensive search
for the familiar,
touched something alien,
she would halt,freeze, and then begin to whimper softly,
in heaven knows what depth of terror.

The years went by.
Her innocent, heroic heart gave out at last.
She died.
And I grew old.

In the course of time,
one night in sudden darkness of a blackout,
I lived my sister's panic
while groping for the light switch on the wall
I knew was there but could not find.
And, with the loss of some essential faith
in what is naturally due me,
like the permanence of my breathing,
all at once my blind eyes saw my death,
as fear-ful as the thousand deaths my sister died
each time she touched the empty dark.
.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
published by Hybrid Nation

Beverly Gray in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“It frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened.”

These words mark the reaction of a young Australian named Helen Caldicott to a story of the aftermath of mistaken nuclear war, in which those who never even took sides were faced with the slow advance of deadly nuclear radiation on their shores. On the Beach, first a best-selling novel and then a major Hollywood film, confronts the viewer with a number of questions: How would you behave if—in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse—you knew you only have a few weeks or months left to live? Would you carouse riotously, knowing the end is near? Deny that the entire thing is happening? Hope against all logic for a miraculous reprieve? Try to maintain a core of decency in the face of imminent death? Wish that you had done something long ago to prevent nuclear war in the first place?

The story’s effect on Caldicott, then a 19-year-old Melbourne medical student who’d just learned about genetics and radiation, was profound. She went on to become both a pediatrician and a feisty anti-nuclear activist, an inspiration to others in the non-proliferation community and in the nuclear humanitarian initiative. She is renowned for warning, “It could happen tonight by accident,” and with the onset of nuclear winter, “We’ll all freeze to death in the dark.”

But what about the book itself and the 1959 movie made from it?

More here.

Ha-Joon Chang in The Guardian:

There are books that you know before reading them will change you. There are books you read precisely because you want to change yourself. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy belonged to neither category. In fact, H2G2 (as a tribe of Douglas Adams fandom calls it) is special because I didn’t expect it to have any effect on me, let alone one so enduring. I don’t even remember exactly when I read it, except that it was in the first few years of my arrival in Britain as a graduate student in 1986. The only thing I remember is being intrigued by the description of it as a piece of comedy science fiction (SF).

I had been a fan of SF since I was 10 or 11, when I started devouring what I could from the rather meagre selection (often in simplified children’s editions) available in Korea in the 1970s and 80s. SF was serious stuff then: intergalactic wars and imperialism (Skylark), technological dystopia (Brave New World), post-apocalyptic worlds (On the Beach, The Day of the Triffids). It wasn’t supposed to be comical.

But H2G2 was the funniest thing I had ever read. It wasn’t just hilarious, it was beyond my then mental universe: a depressed robot that saves the lives of the novel’s protagonists by striking up a casual conversation with the enemy spaceship’s computer and unintentionally talking it into depression and then suicide; the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council surviving a recitation of bad poetry by gnawing one of his legs off; the title of the third book in the God-bashing trilogy by Oolon Colluphid, Who is this God Person Anyway?

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta Magazine:

Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time.

That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics and statistics. Rather, it’s because of the creation for which he’s most famous: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), often simply called “Sloane” by its users.

This giant repository, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, contains more than a quarter of a million different sequences of numbers that arise in different mathematical contexts, such as the prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 … ) or the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … ). What’s the greatest number of cake slices that can be made with n cuts? Look up sequence A000125 in the OEIS. How many chess positions can be created in n moves? That’s sequence A048987. The number of ways to arrangen circles in a plane, with only two crossing at any given point, is A250001. That sequence just joined the collection a few months ago. So far, only its first four terms are known; if you can figure out the fifth, Sloane will want to hear from you.

A mathematician whose research generates a sequence of numbers can turn to the OEIS to discover other contexts in which the sequence arises and any papers that discuss it. The repository has spawned countless mathematical discoveries and has been cited more than 4,000 times.

“Many mathematical articles explicitly mention how they were inspired by OEIS, but for each one that does, there are at least ten who do not mention it, not necessarily out of malice, but because they take it for granted,” wrote Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician at Rutgers University.

The collection, which began in 1964 as a stack of handwritten index cards, gave rise to a 1973 book containing 2,372 sequences, and then a 1995 book, co-authored with mathematician Simon Plouffe, containing just over 5,000 sequences. By the following year, so many people had submitted sequences to Sloane that the collection nearly doubled in size, so he moved it onto the Internet. Since then, Sloane has personally created entries for more than 170,000 sequences.

More here.

Miri Davidson over at the Verso blog:

I met Christine Delphy in 2003. Curiously, back then her name was not very familiar to me. Curiously – or maybe not. After all, though I was already a feminist and a sociologist, in my studies I had never heard any discussion of gender (except in the United States). My feminist sensibilities were fed by a strong feeling of injustice, but like any French woman who grew up during the backlash of the 1980s, I was long reticent to the idea that there is a structural sexism, something more than a question of men and women’s individual good will.

The late 1990s and 2000s were formative years, and reading Christine’s texts played a decisively important role in this. I could say that this meeting was, for me, part of that mass of little miracles that make engagement possible, desirable, and even necessary; and most importantly, joyous rather than sad. One among the many motivations at the origin of this film is the hope of remaking this miracle of political emancipation for other people, when everything, a priori, incites us to inaction.

Among Christine’s writings, I would firstly cite her ‘Our friends and ourselves’, which appeared in her book The Main Enemy. After a number of years hanging around the far Left [gauche de la gauche] and then being active in a mixed feminist group, this text was a long breath of fresh air, an ointment for the open wounds that had been inflicted by other activists’ unyielding sexism and the – slightly more euphemised – sexism of the intellectual world. Reading and rereading this text, I no longer had to deal with these little humiliations alone. I could talk about them in the non-mixed feminist groups that I now came to be active in, and together with these women friends mock the virilism of the activists determined to change the world with their testosterone.

Christine Delphy taught me to be a feminist with laughter. Her humour does not only consist of bon mots. It has privileged targets: the ‘masculine grotesque’ that Simone de Beauvoir talked about (‘this way of taking oneself seriously, this vanity, considering oneself important’) but also naïve and gauchely optimistic postures.

More here.

Chris Barden in China Now:

“Either Chinese characters die or China is doomed.” The author of these words-penned in the same ideographic text he wished to see scrapped—was none other than the writer and rebel Lu Hsun. Lu was one of China’s greatest 20th century writers, its most influential promoter of vernacular fiction, and a key proponent of the New Writing movement of the 1930s.

Although often remembered for donning multiple hats-medical student, artist, activist and political icon-few would associate the author of The Diary of a Madman with the proposed eradication of China’s most unique contribution to the world’s linguistic heritage–the more than 55,000 ideographs (hanzi) that make up the Chinese written language.

But while China’s hanzi were once the most salient symbol of its cultural dominance of East Asia, by the mid-19th century the empire found its ports colonized by much younger countries buzzing with languages that used measly 26-letter alphabets.
Meanwhile, literacy and written culture in China were hampered by the relative impenetrability of those aesthetically elegant, compactly square, meaning-rich ideographs. And China lagged fatally behind its onetime cultural dependent, Japan, which had effectively combined Chinese characters with two phonetic syllabaries. Japanese bomber pilots did not need advanced degrees in literature to read their flight manuals.

Like other reformers, Lu Hsun therefore called for a “Latinized” vernacular phonetic system to replace hanzi entirely, thus expediting a system whose goal was to effect a crucial expansion in literacy and a leveling of the unfair linguistic advantage of the undemocratic literati.

Because of this diseased, tetragonal legacy, fulminated Lu Hsun, “For thousands of years, the vast majority of our people have been martyrs to illiteracy, and China finds itself in its current state. While other countries have already developed technology to create rain, we are still worshipping snakes and summoning spirits.”

More here.

Emily Strasser in Guernica:

Today marks seventy years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. On this day seventy years ago, my grandfather was working in the top-secret lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that was responsible for enriching the uranium that fueled the Hiroshima bomb. If he understood the extent of the project before news of the bombing crackled over the radio that day, I’ll never know. He would continue a career in nuclear weapons, as Oak Ridge was enlisted in the feverish race to build bigger and bigger bombs. How much his eventual mental and emotional collapse was fed by guilt, I can only guess. Oak Ridge taught secrecy. George died nearly four years before his daughter-in-law, my mother, held me in a Chicago living room and wept in a state of postpartum despair over the possibility that she had brought a daughter into a world doomed to nuclear annihilation.

Now I am twenty-seven, one year older than George was seventy years ago, and today, I am in Hiroshima.

How do we walk through a landscape that has seen this sort of death?

Here it is bright hot summer, the air so humid I am instantly soaked through. The Peace Park, just blocks from the explosion’s hypocenter, is lush and green and thrumming with cicadas like I’ve never heard. I stand in front of the cenotaph, a stone tomb containing nearly 300,000 names of deceased A-bomb victims, those who died on August 6th and those who’ve died since; one volume is dedicated to, “a multitude of those whose names remain unaccounted for.”

It’s in the shadow of a saddle-shaped arch, which frames the Flame of Peace and the skeletal ruins of the now-iconic A-Bomb Dome behind. I watch as other visitors take turns posing in front of the arch. The gesture strikes me as strange, but I don’t know how to be in this place, either.

More here.

Graham Farmelo in The Guardian:

Leading scientists often talk about science in ways that are patently unscientific. In his new book, the Nobel prizewinning American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek asks: “Is the world a work of art?” Such a question is surely impossible to consider in scientific terms, using only statements that could be proved to be wrong. Any answer to the question is certain to be merely a matter of opinion. Compared with other branches of science, theoretical physics has produced more than its share of scientific aesthetes, including Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, who both had the rare experience of producing theories commonly described as beautiful, akin to great works of art. Perhaps it was partly for this reason that these two great scientists took as their lodestar the ill-defined concept of beauty. For Dirac, mathematical beauty was “almost a religion”. I doubt whether Wilczek would go that far, but he is deeply enamoured of the symmetries and harmonies at the heart of nature. A Beautiful Question is the most recent of the books he has written on this theme and in my view it is his best, most likely to appeal to readers who have plenty of curiosity but little or no knowledge of mathematics. (Full disclosure: he contributed to the collection of essays It Must be Beautiful that I edited over a decade ago.)

Wilczek begins with what he calls “a meditation” in ancient Greece. He especially admires Plato, who took a geometric approach to understanding matter and the universe. Although many of these ideas can now look strange to modern eyes, they also appear to be profound, influential and far-sighted. As Wilczek points out, modern theories of the most basic constituents of matter and their most fundamental interactions “are rooted in heightened of symmetry that would surely make Plato smile”. But it is in the sections of the book dealing with modern theories that Wilczek is at his most illuminating. He describes how Einstein brought “a new style into thinking about nature’s fundamental principles” using “beauty, in the form of symmetry”. Almost a century ago, this led him – after an eight-year struggle – to a new understanding of gravity, in terms of the curvature of space-time, in his monumental general theory of relativity.

More here.

Jyoti Madhusoodanan in Nature:

The latest biomedical technologies, from fetal stem cells to human gene editing, offer huge potential for treating disease. They also raise tricky ethical questions that can eventually result in guidelines on how to prevent their misuse. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker argues that this sweeping ethical oversight delays innovation and offers little benefit. The article ignited much discussion on social media among bioethicists and researchers. Many disagreed with Pinker, including Daniel Sokol, a London-based bioethicist and lawyer, who wrote in a blog post that ethicists should at times ‘get in the way’. Research to alleviate human suffering is important, he added, but “misguided attempts to help can — and have — led to incalculable harm”. In his article, Pinker wrote that delays caused by bioethical regulations can lead to loss of life because potential treatments are withheld from patients. He added that the future of biotechnologies is so difficult to accurately predict that policies based on these predictions will not effectively reduce risk. “The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way.”

Bioethics is not meant to stand in the way of research, Sokol wrote — but the consideration of potential harms cannot be left to researchers alone. “Virtually everyone would, in good faith but quite wrongly, consider their research ethically exemplary,” Sokol wrote. Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University in California, pointed to an example of bioethics doing its job: the 1975 Asilomar conference, at which researchers, lawyers and physicians agreed guidelines on how best to use recombinant DNA technologies. “One might point out that maybe we didn’t have problems with recombinant DNA technologies because of Asilomar,” says Greely. “Some issues are worth thinking about because they could turn into concrete, real risks.”

More here.

Death of the Bookstore
.

“Today,” the eulogist said
to the gathering that stood alongside
the large wooden box which enclosed the store’s remains

now suspended on straps above empty space,
“we commit this venture to the ground
from which all things are formed

of star fabric, and to which we also
will return. This one we loved
joins too many of its siblings

vanishing too young. But as the body
is not the soul, a bookstore
is not a book. What sustains the one

is not the substance of the other.
Let us then take consolation: books
flourished long before this shop

opened, and live on
though we mourn today a familiar presence
dispersed to ash and wind.

Let those who deny the soul, the human urge
to story, the gratitude and pleasure in the mind
as we read and listen,

proclaim that the book, like this shop,
is dead
and the author dead

and the reader likewise.
Every cult is founded on the nonsensical,
and this one’s believers find comfort

in closing their eyes to the word in the world,
as if the deaf were to chant determinedly
There is no sound. Clay tablets,

papyrus, vellum scrolls
all bore the word, but the bound volume
outmatched them. And accompanying the book,

the bookstore—that carries its titles,
as we say: the tangibility, handiness,
capacity to be shared

amid the silence in which the imagination lives
that no electron, with its ephemerality, solipsism,
electric fans and beeps, can equal.

So be of courage, though today
a diminishment saddens us.
We give that which we cherished

to earth as a bulb in autumn
with the sure and certain hope
that after the vagaries of icy winter

a stalk will arise that lifts
petals of cheering color and delight.
In our grief, let us continue to honor

the spirit once housed in this departed
whose like, no matter what reversal or glory might yet be,
we shall never see again.”
.
.
by Tom Wayman
from The Hudson Review
Summer 2015

Chris Suellentrop in The New York Times Magazine:

In keeping with the state motto — ad astra per aspera, or ‘‘to the stars through difficulties’’ — Kansas politics have always been touched with a spirit of the avant-garde and the unorthodox, from popular sovereignty to prohibition and beyond. Today, thanks in large part to Brownback, the state is a petri dish for movement conservatism, a window into how the national Republican Party might govern if the opposition vanished. The 125 legislators of the House of Representatives include 97 Republicans; the Senate has an even greater percentage of Republicans, with only 8 Democrats among the 40 senators. With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.

This fervor for budget-cutting is hardly unique to Kansas. At the federal level, the opposition party in the White House has kept the Republican majority in Congress from making much headway. But there are 23 states in the Union controlled entirely by Republicans, from statehouse to governor’s mansion — 24, if you count Nebraska’s technically nonpartisan, unicameral legislature — compared with just six (and Washington, D.C.) on the Democratic side. In these Republican states, the combination of the Great Recession with the anti-Obama elections of 2010 and 2014 has allowed legislators to make deeper cuts to the size and scope of government than has been possible in Washington for decades. In 2012, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, state governments spent $9 billion less than they did the previous year — the first such decline in 50 years. Many of these cuts have fallen on education. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Tom Corbett cut funding for the state’s public universities by 20 percent, a compromise from his original proposal of 50 percent. Last month in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, backed by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system.

As many tax-cutting states have found later on, the party’s deep-seated opposition to tax increases of any kind can make balancing the budget a high-wire act.

More here.