The full text of an SMS I received at 11:13am this morning:

Please check your campus e-mail for a mes­sage from the pres­i­dent about a homi­cide that occurred last night on S. Ellis Ave.

The text mes­sage was the first non-​test output of an emer­gency response system put in place at the U. of C. after the Vir­ginia Tech shoot­ings. The email, from U. of C. pres­i­dent Robert Zim­mer­man, related these fur­ther details:

It is with the great­est pos­si­ble sad­ness that I write to inform you of the tragic killing of one of our grad­u­ate stu­dents last night. Amadou Cisse, an inter­na­tional stu­dent com­plet­ing his Ph.D. degree in chem­istry, was shot and killed at 1:26 a.m. in the street near 6120 S. Ellis Ave. We are sad­dened and out­raged by this ter­ri­ble event, and our hearts go out to the student’s family, friends, col­leagues and neighbors.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in today’s Tri­bune, Cisse was 28 29, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in chem­istry from Sene­gal whose research exam­ined atomic oxygen ero­sion. He suc­cess­fully defended his dis­ser­ta­tion last week, and was sched­uled to receive his degree on Decem­ber 7. The Uni­ver­sity will award his doc­tor­ate posthumously.

UPDATE (11/20/07):

In case poetry and gender isn’t your thing, here’s some­thing from today’s NYT:

Chicago police offi­cers are the sub­ject of more bru­tal­ity com­plaints per offi­cer than the national aver­age, and the Police Depart­ment is far less likely to pursue abuse cases seri­ously than the national norm, a legal team at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago reported Wednesday….

The national aver­age among large police depart­ments for excessive-​force com­plaints is 9.5 per 100 full-​time offi­cers. For a depart­ment of Chicago’s size (13,500, second only to New York), that would cor­re­spond to 1,283 com­plaints a year. From 1999 to 2004, how­ever, cit­i­zens filed about 1,774 bru­tal­ity com­plaints a year against Chicago offi­cers [i.e. 13.1 out of 100 officers].

The report from the U. of C. Police Account­abil­ity Project also says:

Less than five per­cent of the Depart­ment account for nearly half of all abuse com­plaints against the CPD. Indeed, 662 Chicago police offi­cers, a little less than 5% of the CPD’s 13,500 member force, amassed 11 or more offi­cial mis­con­duct com­plaints between 2001 and 2006. Because the vast major­ity of offi­cers get only a few com­plaints in their entire careers, it is easy to iden­tify those who may be engaged in a pat­tern of abu­sive behav­ior. They lit­er­ally jump off the page….Yet, the CPD refuses to look or allow others to look at its “repeater” data. It chooses not to know—avoiding crit­i­cal self-​examination and fight­ing public and judi­cial scrutiny of its practices….

As the num­bers detailed above illus­trate plainly, “not know­ing” about police abuse in Chicago requires a great deal of active effort. It requires a deep com­mit­ment to the machin­ery of denial, includ­ing deny­ing inci­dents of bru­tal­ity, turn­ing a blind eye to pat­terns of abuse, refus­ing to look at data that is just a key stroke or two away, and pas­sively encour­ag­ing a cul­ture of silence in the face of abuse per­pe­trated by fellow officers.

Pervez Mushar­raf cashes the check that Pres­i­dent Bush wrote him on Sep­tem­ber 24, 2001:

Secu­rity forces were reported to have detained about 500 oppo­si­tion party fig­ures, lawyers and human rights advo­cates on Sunday, and about a dozen pri­vately owned tele­vi­sion news sta­tions remained off the air. Inter­na­tional broad­cast­ers, includ­ing the BBC and CNN, were also cut off.

The biggest sur­prise? It’s the lawyers who are fight­ing back.

(Quote by Jane Perlez and David Rohde. Photo by Khalid Tanveer.)

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.