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The Silo and the Demolition Crew

Howard Stein taught me that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He was defending a wall between two free rooms. China and the United States are now knocking down the building. Howard Stein used to stand at the front of a seminar room at Columbia’s Oscar Hammerstein II Center and tell a room full of playwrights that the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities. He had earned the right to say it. Eleven years at the Yale School of Drama as associate dean and head of playwriting, seven years running the playwriting program at Iowa, ten years as the first permanent chairman of the Hammerstein Center, and a lifetime spent turning young writers into working dramatists. When a man like that tells you the Humanities are the enemy, you do not argue. You wait to understand.

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When the Chief of Police Violates Privacy

Tom Casady is currently the Chief of Police for Lincoln, Nebraska.  As a child of Lincoln, I enjoy reading his fantastic blog called, “The Chief’s Corner.”  I was recently alarmed when I read an article written by Tom that rehashed the offensive/silly/inappropriate email usernames people use to inquire about employment with the Lincoln Police Department.  I was shocked to see the email usernames of applicants revealed in public on Tom’s blog because that is in the least a violation of privacy for those making an inquiry, and perhaps, even a more serious ethical violation of a vested public city official.  I was unable to find the recent article that shocked me, but doing a search on Tom’s site led me to a dead link for this page written on December 2, 2008 where Tom Casady revealed live email usernames of the inquirers — figuring our the entire email address is not that hard and often doing a Google search on a unique username alone can reveal a lot.  I have blurred the email addresses contained in that article:

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