【Fish】小组 凝羽欲翔 comments 记录

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】6-1

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm What Is a Philosopher? By Simon Critchley There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（千年期） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus（达成一致）, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（好句）. What I’d like to do in the opening column（类似写作栏目的开篇之作？？） in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（solve the problem?） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.” What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（滑稽剧演员）, the butt（笑柄） of countless jokes from Aristophanes（阿里斯托芬，古希腊诗人）’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty（必定的事物） Pythonesque（滑稽的） definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly. But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim. But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off（原意为剥皮，这里为一层一层剥开） more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them（remind me of a sentence: Freedom is a wide and risky river; it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it.）. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity(混乱), fascination and curiosity. By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression（离题，脱轨）” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further（可用于更深一层分析）, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked（坏事情） things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster（奸诈的人）.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness（另一个世界的）, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly. Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores（风俗习惯） and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth（没搞懂这是啥玩意儿？）. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere. This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（无信仰的） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life. A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks（可以用来取来various people have various opinions 哈！）. Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.” Of course, one might object（反对）, that ridiculing someone’s stammer（结巴） isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time（描述生活环境可用）, there is something dreadfully uncanny（神秘的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm What Is a Philosopher? By Simon Critchley There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（千年期） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus（达成一致）, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（好句）. What I’d like to do in the opening column（类似写作栏目的开篇之作？？） in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（solve the problem?） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.” What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（滑稽剧演员）, the butt（笑柄） of countless jokes from Aristophanes（阿里斯托芬，古希腊诗人）’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty（必定的事物） Pythonesque（滑稽的） definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly. But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim. But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off（原意为剥皮，这里为一层一层剥开） more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them（remind me of a sentence: Freedom is a wide and risky river; it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it.）. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity(混乱), fascination and curiosity. By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression（离题，脱轨）” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further（可用于更深一层分析）, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked（坏事情） things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster（奸诈的人）.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness（另一个世界的）, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly. Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores（风俗习惯） and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth（没搞懂这是啥玩意儿？）. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere. This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（无信仰的） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life. A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks（可以用来取来various people have various opinions 哈！）. Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.” Of course, one might object（反对）, that ridiculing someone’s stammer（结巴） isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time（描述生活环境可用）, there is something dreadfully uncanny（神秘的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
What Is a Philosopher?
By Simon Critchley

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（千年期） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus（达成一致）, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（好句）. What I’d like to do in the opening column（类似写作栏目的开篇之作？？） in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（solve the problem?） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（滑稽剧演员）, the butt（笑柄） of countless jokes from Aristophanes（阿里斯托芬，古希腊诗人）’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty（必定的事物） Pythonesque（滑稽的） definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off（原意为剥皮，这里为一层一层剥开） more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them（remind me of a sentence: Freedom is a wide and risky river; it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it.）.

The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity(混乱), fascination and curiosity.

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression（离题，脱轨）” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

Pushing this a little further（可用于更深一层分析）, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked（坏事情） things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster（奸诈的人）.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness（另一个世界的）, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores（风俗习惯） and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth（没搞懂这是啥玩意儿？）. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（无信仰的） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks（可以用来取来various people have various opinions 哈！）.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Of course, one might object（反对）, that ridiculing someone’s stammer（结巴） isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time（描述生活环境可用）, there is something dreadfully uncanny（神秘的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】7-1

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving By Stanley Fish The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash（破坏） between two bad paradigms.（好句） The first paradigm is embedded in and configures the bill’s targeted program（“组成”还可以这样表达撒）, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic（支配，霸权） curriculum” and “a pedagogy（教育学） based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed（压迫）.” Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst（？？） when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny（暴政） have been internalized by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical effort（比 great 好多了） to liberate yourself from them. underwrite: 签在。。。之下，给。。。保险，支付承诺 They underwrote the coal mine's bond.他们同意买下该煤矿仍未认购的股票。 That effort is education, properly reconceived（重新构思） not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”（这一段用在Issue 130 最恰当不过了） To say that this view of education is political is to understate the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherents（追随者，可以取代followers） as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude（闭塞，封住） so that they can join the effort to topple it（没用turn upside down）. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges(抵押，誓言，保证) to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.” If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse（假马，引申为借口） or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra（颂歌，咒语） in the world of educational theory.) It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization（忽视，互斥，边缘化，排斥） and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic（导致。。）, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction. This is one case, however, where the remedy is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it（用来比喻用ethnic course来解决hegemonic的问题）. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandates the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial tone（定调）, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship（确定了。。的关系） between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred. This would be a great surprise to those communitarian theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie（比喻普通的美国人？？）, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence（法学体系）. But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate（审问） it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious（邪恶的） purposes must be banished from public education. The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric（有点偏比喻的意味，用得好，照应了前面的treatment跟disease）. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize（消毒，去毒措施） history and social studies.” Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing（改变宗教信仰）; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm
Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
By Stanley Fish

The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash（破坏） between two bad paradigms.（好句）

The first paradigm is embedded in and configures the bill’s targeted program（“组成”还可以这样表达撒）, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic（支配，霸权） curriculum” and “a pedagogy（教育学） based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed（压迫）.”

Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst（？？） when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny（暴政） have been internalized by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical effort（比 great 好多了） to liberate yourself from them.

underwrite: 签在。。。之下，给。。。保险，支付承诺
They underwrote the coal mine's bond.他们同意买下该煤矿仍未认购的股票。

That effort is education, properly reconceived（重新构思） not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”（这一段用在Issue 130 最恰当不过了）

To say that this view of education is political is to understate the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherents（追随者，可以取代followers） as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude（闭塞，封住） so that they can join the effort to topple it（没用turn upside down）. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges(抵押，誓言，保证) to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.”

If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse（假马，引申为借口） or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra（颂歌，咒语） in the world of educational theory.)

It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization（忽视，互斥，边缘化，排斥） and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic（导致。。）, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction.

This is one case, however, where the remedy is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it（用来比喻用ethnic course来解决hegemonic的问题）. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandates the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial tone（定调）, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship（确定了。。的关系） between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred.

This would be a great surprise to those communitarian theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie（比喻普通的美国人？？）, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence（法学体系）.

But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate（审问） it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious（邪恶的） purposes must be banished from public education.

The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric（有点偏比喻的意味，用得好，照应了前面的treatment跟disease）. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize（消毒，去毒措施） history and social studies.”

Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing（改变宗教信仰）; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

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【COMMENT】8-1

May 17, 2010, 5:07 pm
Time to Review Workplace Reviews?
By TARA PARRER-POPE

After years of studying the ill effects of workplace stress, psychologists are turning their attention to its causes. Along with the usual suspects — long hours, bad bosses, office bullies（办公室老大） — they have identified some surprising ones.

The focus on workplace health comes as worker satisfaction in the United States appears to be at an all-time low. The Conference Board reported recently that just 45 percent of workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent in 1987. The findings, based on a survey of 5,000 households, show that the decline goes well beyond concerns about job security. Employees are unhappy about the design of their jobs, the health of their organizations and the quality of their managers.

A number of studies have documented the health toll（记录，用document的哇） of workplace stress, showing that unhappy workers are at higher risk for heart problems and depression, among other things. This month, Danish researchers reported on a 15-year study of 12,000 nurses finding that nurses struggling with excessive work pressures had double the risk for a heart attack. And a British study tracking 6,000 workers for 11 years found that those who regularly worked more than 10 hours a day had a 60 percent higher risk for heart disease than those who put in 7 hours.

Samuel A. Culbert, a clinical psychologist who teaches at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, says too many people work in a “toxic” environment, and the title of his new book (from Hachette) throws a spotlight on one of the culprits（throw a sportlight on sth / throw a light on sth）: “Get Rid of the Performance Review!”

Annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, he argues, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs. He says reviews are so subjective — so dependent on the worker’s relationship with the boss — as to be meaningless. He says he has heard from countless workers who say their work life was ruined by an unfair review.

“There is a very bad set of values that are embedded in the air because of performance reviews,” he told me.

Not every expert agrees that reviews should simply be abolished. Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University management professor, says they can be valuable if properly executed. But he added, “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at all.”

Frank Cordaro, 56, of Ontario, N.Y., said years of good performance were undone by one bad review from a new manager. He refused to sign the review and ended up taking medication to cope with the anxiety and stress at work. Eventually he lost his job.

“It played hell with my physical health, my mental health, too,” said Mr. Cordaro, adding that he is much happier since he started his own business. “When you’re always fearing for your job, it’s not a good situation.”

Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash., says office bullies have been known to use performance reviews to undermine a worker(损害worker).
“I say, ‘Throw it out,’ because it becomes a very biased, error-prone（易于出错的， prone表示趋向，error-prone趋向出错的，abuse-prone趋向滥用的） and abuse-prone system,” said Dr. Namie, the author of “The Bully at Work” (Sourcebooks, 2000). “It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”

Mark Shahriary, president and chief executive of Lucix Corporation in Camarillo, Calif., said he stopped doing performance reviews after witnessing the emotional havoc they created for workers at his previous job. “People confuse the review with who they are,” he told me. “If they get a review saying, ‘You’re not effective at work,’ they would hear, ‘You’re not effective as a person.’ ”

Another area of interest in workplace health is “destructive leadership,” which studies the role that supervisors play in the psychological health of their employees. Even if a workplace can’t eliminate stress, research suggests that employees cope better when they have a good relationship with their boss.

“If I’m consulting in an organization and there are morale problems, the first thing I would look at is the relationship with leaders,” said Robert R. Sinclair, an associate professor of psychology at Clemson University. “One of the findings we can be pretty confident in is that people who have more support from supervisors tend to do better in stressful situations.”

And bad bosses are an enormous source of stress. In one British study of nurses, workers who didn’t like their supervisors had consistently elevated blood pressure throughout the workday.

Although there is little an individual can do about such a boss, the American Psychological Association offers some tips, including finding a mentor（指导者，良师益友） within the company to discuss strategies for dealing with a problem supervisor.

The association notes that one of the hazards of such a relationship is self-defeating behavior, like submitting poor work or waging a personal attack on the boss. For that reason, it says, workers need to focus on managing their own negative emotions（控制自己的emotion，没记错的话好像有一篇argu就是写这个的，注意manage这个词用的很广，I manage to arrive on time. ）.

But the reality is that employees are relatively helpless in the face of an abusive supervisor. Problems with a boss are among the most common reasons workers quit their jobs. Dr. Sutton, whose new book “Good Boss, Bad Boss” (coming from Business Plus) argues that good bosses are essential to workplace success, said skyrocketing health care costs should motivate businesses to focus on ways to lower stress.

“Who is the biggest source of stress on the job? It’s your immediate supervisor,” he said. “The pile of evidence(pile用得好) coming out shows that if you want to be an effective organization or an effective boss, you’ve got to strike a balance between humanity and performance.”

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【COMMENT】8-2

A New Clue to Explain Existence
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: May 17, 2010

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel（揭开，拆散） one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends（预兆） fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider（碰撞机） outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

portend：预兆
His silent portends trouble.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze（燃烧，发光） of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.
“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk at Fermilab a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.

It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident（意见不同的人） and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail（超过） over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins(纺纱) of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic（亚原子） particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter（一事物超过另一事物）, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of（可以取代 says by） Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

prevail：超过，战胜，克服
Law offer us the best hope of overcoming the differences that prevail the world.

The new effect hinges on（转移，依赖于） the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds（物质反应还可以人格化哈！）. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance（多数的，占优势） of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay（退化） to muons.

Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning（渴望） for almost as long.

yearn： 渴望
It's all I know, all I yearn, all that I live for.
这就是我所知道的，我所渴望的，我所为之生存的

Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at（戳动） with the Large Hadron Collider.”

poke at：戳动，反复拨动
poke at with foot or toe 用脚尖轻轻走路


Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”

Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath（屏息等待） until the results are confirmed by other experiments.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God（我不敢说这个宣布相当于找到了真理，但至少揭开了真理的面纱）.”

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【COMMENT】9-1

Thailand's crisis Red dawn Thailand’s army marches in to crush the months-long protest in Bangkok May 19th 2010 | BANGKOK | From The Economist online FOR six days, clouds of black smoke hung over Bangkok’s jagged（交错的，锯齿状的） skyline, marking out flashpoints in a prolonged political drama(很好的表达方式). At dawn on May 19th, the show reached its bloody climax. Combat troops supported by armoured（盔甲的） vehicles pushed into the red shirts’ protest camp. A few thousand stragglers had held out there, defiant（公然违抗） to the end. But a group of their leaders, once captured, went quietly, drawing howls of disapproval from their diehard（顽固分子） supporters. Other protest leaders may have slipped away. The black smoke grew thicker and more noxious as angry protesters set fire to tyre-and-bamboo barricades and the ritzy（豪华的） shopping area where they had bedded down for several weeks. The assault on the fortified camp was methodical（有条理的） and met only scattered resistance（零零星星的抵抗，scattered用得好） from gunmen holed up inside. Security forces kept overwhelming force on their side. It was not, mercifully, the replay of the Tiananmen Square massacre that some had predicted, though some 40 people have died in violent clashes since last week. Most of the protesters were herded away(驱散) to evacuation points. On the outskirts of the camp however, riots flared along a major road that had seen the worst of the recent fighting. Arson attacks spread to new areas, and gun battles erupted beneath the blackened underside of a fly-over. Nearby a port slum（贫民区） has begun staging its own red-shirt rally（红衫军驻扎在贫民区）. Keeping a lid(解放) on unruly crowds and stopping the red shirts from regrouping may be the army’s next test. But that is only a start for the country. Bridging the deep social and economic divisions in Thai society, and crafting（带来，这个词用得好，比set up好多了） a new political balance will be a long-term challenge for whatever sort（种类，不用kind） of government emerges from this disaster. The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, has failed to make any headway towards reconciliation. He had already created a terrific obstacle to（create a terrific obstacle to do sth） peace on April 10th, when he hastily sent in troops to clear another protest site; 25 people died but the red shirts remained. But Mr Abhisit may deserve credit for offering a plausible compromise to the red shirts. That the leaders of their United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) failed to grasp this olive branch is tragic. They must bear some responsibility for the lives lost, as do the soldiers who marched into downtown Bangkok. As recently as May 18th an eleventh-hour ceasefire had appeared close. But the mistrust on both sides proved impossible to bridge, and the talks failed. In retrospect, a negotiated end to the stand-off（基准距） may have been doomed since May 13th, when a sniper picked off Khattiya Sawasdipol, a rogue army general who had sided with(支持，原来支持还可以这样讲的哇) the red shirts and taunted（讥讽） his commanders. Widespread fighting broke out while General Khattiya lay in a coma, days before his death. Army units trying to block off the sprawling（蔓延，没有方向地伸展） protest site came under attack by a mob tossing（抖动的行为及过程） rocks, firecrackers and petrol bombs. Shadowy black-clad militia joined the melee alongside the red shirts, though only fleetingly. Soldiers opened fire without much restraint, even at paramedics trying to bring out the wounded. Road junctions were declared as “live-fire zones”. The mayhem spread to other parts of the city. The military cordon appeared to be breaking as red shirts defied orders to stay away. Something had to give. In the end it was not a political deal between the warring factions but instead overwhelming force that won the day. lay in a deep coma 深深地吸了一口气，昏迷的时候 As the bullets flew, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister and billionaire telecoms tycoon who encouraged the red shirts after he lost power in 2006 to a military coup, tweeted（小鸟鸣叫） his sorrow to his followers（表达很好撒）. From his exile, Mr Thaksin denied, once again, that he was giving orders to the red-shirts leaders and urged everyone to embrace peace（还可以用embrace！）. There is little doubt, however, that Mr Thaksin held sway（占统治低位） over the splintered（碎片）, squabbling（争吵，吵嘴） leadership of the UDD. The two-month protest would not have been possible without his deep pockets(很多的财产，还可以这样说的那) and political network. Though the red-shirt cause outgrew him, his stubbornness seems to have undone the peace talks. outgrow 长得比什么都快 Americans never outgrow this stage, continuing to indulge themselves and dodge responsibility right into senility. 美国人摆脱不了这个年龄的心态。他们总是纵容自己，回避责任，直到已至垂暮之年。 These mutant plants eventually outgrow the infection. 这些变异植物最终成功抵抗了感染。 The aftermath of the May 19th crackdown will likely see continued unrest, both around Bangkok’s slums and in Thailand’s north and north-east. The north-east accounts for around one-third of parliamentary seats. Since 2001, the region has overwhelmingly voted for Mr Thaksin and his allies. The red shirts had sought to force a new election in the belief that voters would turf out Mr Abhisit, the darling of Bangkok’s privileged classes. Protesters there were quick to stage arson attacks in retaliation for their rout in Bangkok. The government put the city under a curfew（宵禁） on May 19th, its first since 1992. As Thailand stumbles into the next phase of its crisis, many will be asking how it came to this. If politics is the art of the compromise（用得好艺术哦）, Thais had appeared to be experts. Various political factions, both elected and unelected, cobbled（粗糙地制作） together governments that oversaw steady economic growth even as they squabbled and scrapped for the spoils. That pragmatic formula no longer works, not when political crises have polarised opinions within families, workplaces and communities, and hollowed out the centre hollow空的，空洞的，无价值的 the hollow of somebody's hand在某人的手心

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Financial reform
Almost there
The Senate votes for financial reform, but some important issues remain unresolved
May 21st 2010 | NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON, DC | From The Economist online

FINANCIAL reform is coming to America. On May 20th, after more than three weeks of often rancorous(充满仇恨，怨恨的，恶意的) debate（比fierce的程度要深）, the Senate approved the biggest overhaul（彻底检查，彻底大修） of the financial system since the Great Depression, by 59 votes to 39. Its bill must now be reconciled with one passed by the House of Representatives in December. The result will be Barack Obama’s second big legislative victory of the year（为啥不用biggest呢？）, after the passage of health-care reform in March.

Tim Geithner, Mr Obama’s treasury secretary, praised Chris Dodd and Harry Reid, the Democratic senators who steered（掌舵，操控） the 1,500-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act to a successful vote, for their “tremendous leadership”. The administration has reason to be pleased, since the bill largely mirrors（怎么用怎么好看） the reform blueprint it had been pushing.

As with most bills, this one has its share of pork（比喻为“share这块肥肉”） and irrelevant provisions, including one requiring buyers of Congolese（刚果人） minerals to prove that the money they hand over is not being used to fund militant groups. But there is much meat at its heart. The bill would beef up(加强，补充，充实) the system for monitoring systemic risks. It would empower the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to wind down（接下） failing financial giants, imposing losses on creditors as well as shareholders. It would create an independent consumer financial-protection bureau. And it would toughen up(使强壮，困难) oversight of derivatives(引出的，派生的事情), requiring most contracts to be channelled through clearing houses and traded on exchanges or exchange-like(类似交易的) platforms.

toughen up：使强壮，困难
The civil councils are determined to toughen up the fight against crime.

Could this bill have prevented the crisis? Not by itself（不单单是他自己）. Some of the most important reforms are outside its purview（视野，范围）（很好的表达方式）. Toughened-up capital and liquidity standards for banks will be hammered out(锤平，阐明，解决) by regulators from around the world in Basel. The Obama administration’s proposed tax on big banks will likely be advanced in（在。。中提到） different legislation. One glaring omission from the Senate and House bills is a plan to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant, accident-prone mortgage agencies now under government conservatorship（英国管理委员会的名字）.

hammer out：锤平，阐明，解决，弄明白
We hammer out the question in a friendly debate.
Our differences are finally hammered out at last in the discussion.
我们的分歧最后在讨论中解决了。

The most important component aimed at preventing another crisis is “resolution authority”, under which any big financial company, not just a bank, can be seized and wound down（缩小，冷清） in an orderly way. Lack of such authority led to the shambolic（大混乱的） failure of Lehman Brothers and the controversial bail-out（跳伞，发红利） of AIG. To win Republican support, however, Mr Dodd made the process so harsh for unsecured creditors that they might flee if they sense panic building（building好形象的说）—forcing the authorities, again, to use ad-hoc measures. Left unanswered（遗留的问题） is how bail-outs will be paid for. The House version of the bill requires banks to chip in（集资，捐款） to a $150 billion up-front（预先的） fund. The Senate bill envisages（想象，设想，面对） the costs being recouped（重获） afterwards, another concession to Republicans.

wound down：缩小，冷清
The party wound down as the guests left. 客人开始离开， party变得冷清。
The company has wounded down to a size that becomes manageable.
The business has wounded down during the recent recession. 在最近经济衰退期间，商业很不景气。

The new consumer-protection bureau should help to close the gap（narrow the gap） between well-regulated banks and poorly regulated mortgage brokers and finance companies, which led the race to the bottom in loan-underwriting（贷款保险商） standards. But many firms, most significantly small banks, are exempted from its authority. And the industry gripes(牢骚，不满) that there is remarkably little independent oversight of the bureau, should it run amok(杀人狂) with（横行，霸道） new regulations that stifle legitimate products. The Senate bill puts the bureau inside the Federal Reserve, though it gives the Fed little say（不给他说话的机会） in its direction; in the House version, the bureau stands alone.

Surprisingly, given the depth of congressional animosity（仇恨） towards it, the Fed emerges as a big winner. It keeps all its existing bank-supervision powers (except for consumer protection) and gets new ones over systemically important non-banks. In a crucial victory, the Fed and the White House fought off(击退) a provision that would have allowed intrusive congressional audits of the central bank’s most delicate monetary-policy decisions. However, such a provision remains in the House version of the bill.

As for Wall Street itself, the outcome is worse than initially expected but better than it might have been(注意句子的陈述方式)—though uncertainties remain. Bankers had hoped that the bill emerging from the Senate-usually the more measured of the two chambers-would be more bank-friendly than the House version. But a flurry（慌慌张张的） of draconian（严酷的） amendments was offered in recent weeks amid a surge in anti-bank sentiment（情操） (fuelled by fraud charges against Goldman Sachs) and political populism in the run-up to congressional primaries. Among those approved was one requiring the Fed to regulate debit-card fees, another setting minimum mortgage-underwriting standards (and banning no-documentation “liar loans”) and a third requiring credit ratings of asset-backed securities to be assigned by a board within the Securities and Exchange Commission. But a proposal to cap banks’ maximum size(cap，帽子，表限制) was defeated, as was one that would have placed restrictions on credit-card interest rates.

draconian:严酷的，严厉的
There has been an overall growth in population, despite some draconian effort to contain it.

run-up
run-up against a matter：摊上这么摊麻烦事
small items soon run up into large amounts 小贷款迅速积累为大数目

But some of banks’ biggest worries remain unresolved. They are resigned to accept some form of the “Volcker rule”, which would restrict their proprietary trading and investment in hedge funds（对冲基金） and private equity（私有财产）. A particularly tough version of the rule was rejected just before the Senate vote, but its authors hold out hope（没有直接说hope哦） that it can be inserted during the weaving-together of the House and Senate bills（这里的意思是不是说House跟Senate bills合作的时候呢？）. The Volcker rule and other looming restrictions could collectively cut large banks’ profits by as much as 15-20% (not counting returned capital from shed businesses), reckon（深思熟虑的） analysts at Morgan Stanley.

Wall Street’s biggest concern is a provision banning deposit-takers from trading credit-default swaps, interest-rate swaps and the like（取代etc了）. Introduced by the head of the Senate Agriculture Committee some weeks ago, it was expected that this would fall by the wayside（路边的，不重要的） during debate. But it proved stubbornly（这个词用得好） persistent, making it into the bill as passed. Ostensibly（表面上） aimed at raising a firewall between run-of-the-mill retail banking and “casino” activities, such a prohibition would hinder risk management（妨碍风险管理） as well as speculation, banks argue.

All eyes will now be on（众人的目光都集中在） the “conference” process that will likely be used to iron out differences between the two bills over the next week or two. This will provide one last lobbying opportunity to Wall Street, which has already spent hundreds of millions trying to influence lawmakers, to the president’s chagrin. Banks will focus much of their effort on(将精力集中在) reversing the swap-dealing ban (which is also opposed by their regulators). Where the two chambers differ, the Senate prevails as a rule—though Barney Frank, the architect of the House bill, has said he will fight to preserve some of his provisions. Once Mr Obama signs the law, many of its vaguer provisions will have to be fleshed out(充实，有血有肉) by financial regulators, a process that could take many months. There are plenty of ambiguities to be tackled, for instance the bills’ loose definition of “swap” and “major swap participant”.

iron out：使不一致的地方一致起来
iron out the differences
iron out a shirt 熨平衣服

lobby：游说，或借助于政府的力量
They are actively lobbying for the bill.
他们正为使bill通过而积极游说议员。

flesh out：充实，有血有肉
The playwriters often fails to flesh out the characters.
剧作家常常不能使角色栩栩如生
He lost weight after his illness, but is begining to flesh out again.
他病后瘦了很多，但现在他又胖回来了。

After the Senate bill was passed, Mr Obama pledged to “ensure that we arrive at a final product that…secures financial stability while preserving the strengths and crucial functions of a financial industry that is central to our prosperity and ability to compete in a global economy.” That remains to be seen. If the history of financial legislation is a guide（拟人化，挺不错）—just think Sarbanes-Oxley—the new law will have more than a few unintended consequences. For now, though, the White House can revel in a political triumph that a year ago seemed to many to be beyond reach.

revel：沉湎
revel in movies 沉湎于电影
Then revel in the view 沉湎与景色里
Children revel in country life. 孩子们都十分喜欢乡村生活