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Boston Herald: Red Sox fans win World Series, lose identity
After waiting 86 years for the Red Sox to break the Curse of the Bambino and win the World Series, Boston fans are rejoicing . . . but also feeling bereft. The Curse was an important part of Boston’s identity, providing constancy through decades of change, and linking Sox fans through year after year of agonizing defeat. “It was always something else we could point the finger at,” says Leonard Zaichkowsky, an SED and MED professor of counseling and sports psychology, in the October 28 edition of the Boston Herald. “What most people never talked about was the possibility that the Red Sox simply didn’t have the skills or the people they needed at the time to win. But when you sweep or get swept, it’s got to be more than luck.”
Boston Globe: Hello Kitty epitomizes Japan’s cult of cute
The cartoon Hello Kitty is superimposed on some 22,000 products sold worldwide, from purses to towels to pencils, and nowhere is the vacant-faced white feline more popular than in Japan, the land of her creation 30 years ago this month. That’s because in Japan “the whole idea of cuteness transcends gender and age to a great degree,” says Merry White, a CAS professor of anthropology, in the Boston Globe on October 28. White wrote the 1994 book The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America, which discusses the significance of Hello Kitty in Japanese culture. “Being cute and being childlike is often positively weighted in Japan, as opposed to the United States, where it’s seen as being unhelpfully dependent.”
New York Times: What is fast food good for? Business.
“It should be no mystery why so many hospitals have welcomed fast food outlets to their doors,” writes Alan Cohen, an SMG professor of health policy management and executive director of the Health Policy Institute, in an October 27 letter to the New York Times commenting on a Times article about the prominence of McDonald’s restaurants in hospitals nationwide. “In an era of tight budgets and reduced payments from insurers, fast food is a profitable source of nonpatient care revenue for hospitals. . . . Not only can patients and health professionals alike indulge their cravings for unhealthy foods, but the hospital is also assured of capturing ‘repeat’ business, now and in the future. Bravo to those hospitals that are seeking to change this unhealthy pattern of dietary, and business, behavior.”
Foster’s Daily Democrat ( Dover, N.H.): National retail sales tax?
President Bush was correct in suggesting recently that a federal retail sales tax should be considered to fund a national retirement system, writes Laurence Kotlikoff in the Dover, N.H., Foster’s Daily Democrat on October 25. Kotlikoff, a CAS economics professor and chairman, writes that such a tax “is equivalent to taxing all wages plus wealth because both are ultimately spent on goods and services . . . . But what if [Bill] Gates saves his earnings and his wealth and spends it later? This delays, but doesn’t reduce, his tax payments since the interest earned on this saving is also taxed when spent. What if Gates gives his money to his kids? Again, there’s no tax avoidance; the kids pay the tax when they spend the gifts or inheritance.”
5
November 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations