The New York Times: a start-all

There is a danger, of course, in reading a "national paper of record" like the Times as an "end-all" to issues and information. It is, however, a great "start-all" to inquiry and reflection for the classroom. I offer these items from yesterday's Sunday edition as strong candidates for prompting journal responses and higher-order discussion in class:

From Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, which discusses the implications of the world's increasing predilection for meat in their diet there is:

"Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States."

And from an Ideas and Trends piece on the recent death of Heath Ledger this statement which begs an essay:

"In generational terms, the death of a contemporary most frightens the young. When one notable lifetime ends, that generation begins to end, too. The death of someone cut down in the prime of life brings home our own mortality. Maybe our rendering them immortal is our way of not facing that inevitability." (italics are mine)

In the Book Review these startling statements from a review of "This Republic of Suffering" which chronicles a nation coming to terms with a sweeping death toll:

"Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform — 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million."

and

"When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them."

And finally, Nicholas D. Kristof on the Op-Ed page finding hope and initiative among a growing cadre of young social entrepreneurs in "The Age of Ambition":

"Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways."

Start-all ideas to wrestle with, respond to, put in context, visualize, and learn from, yes?