Things Noted Here and There
Museum Front: Roberta Smith,"Renaissance Radiance, Gilded in Gothic," New York Times, 28 October, reviews the opening of a remarkable exhibit of Fra Angelico's work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Blake Gopnik,"Out of Turkey: Sultans of Bling," Washington Post, 30 October, reviews a spectacular exhibit of the robes worn by the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire four and five centuries ago at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery of Asia Art.
Plagiarism Front: So, you're Thomas Matrka. You've done a Master's degree in electrical engineering at Ohio University and been admitted to doctoral study there. But you're thinking about going elsewhere because you've found massive plagiarism in theses and dissertations accepted by the school of engineering over the last 15 years: verbatim text in copied quotations, paragraphs, pages, chapters, consecutive chapters, and identical bibliographies. One person didn't even bother to correct a typo in a purloined passage. The local press covers the story here and here. I purloined it from Hiram Hover.
Scooter Front: There will be barrels of ink spilled and considerable bandwith taken up by the Plame investigation before it's over, but I've seen three pieces that are worth reading: 1) Michael Kinsley's"Throw Another Plot on to Boil," Washington Post, 28 October; 2) Joe Strupp,"Carl Bernstein Finds Plame Parallels to Watergate,"* Editor & Publisher, 27 October, in which Bernstein says"We are obviously watching ... the implosion of a presidency ..."; and 3) the astute observations of one of Andrew Sullivan's readers. I hope that you had an opportunity to watch Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference yesterday. This is a very smart, tough lawyer, whose values are well placed and who gives us confidence that the system can work.
*Update: By contrast, Bernstein's Watergate partner, Bob Woodward, has become an administration lapdog.