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The high-school prom is an essential rite of passage in America, whereby all of the traumas and triumphs of youth boil over in a night of excess. The point, illustrated best by the late John Hughes, is to drink illegally, dance stupidly, discover the jock loved you all along but the dork is more lovable, and then, perhaps, lose your virginity. The idea is to experience some premature nostalgia for mis-spent youth, while generating revenue for the rental-tux business.

Given how hard it is already for American teenagers to find a date and a suitable ensemble for this dramatic evening, it was good for a Mississippi high school to make explicit provisions in a memorandum to students:

1. Dates must be of the opposite sex;

2. Only male students are allowed to wear tuxedos.

The problem is that an 18-year-old student named Constance McMillen wants to bring her girlfriend to the prom and wear a tuxedo. She, with back-up from the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded that the school change this prom policy; the school decided to cancel it altogether, reports CNN.

"I never thought the school would try to cancel the prom and hurt everyone just to keep me and my girlfriend from going together," McMillen said in an ACLU news release.  read more »

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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a humanities professor has been on a crusade to reveal the many ways that graduate school is a bad idea. There are too few academic jobs for the training to be anything other than a crap-shoot. This is a problem, particularly because the hurdles to becoming a professor in America include slaving away for years on a PhD and submitting yourself to the low-wage exploitation of adjunct teaching.

Louis Menand addresses this in his new book, "The Marketplace of Ideas" (reviewed by The Economist here). He notes that whereas you can become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four, the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. And then good luck finding a job.

Given all the bad news, I was initially heartened to see that the Chronicle has published a response to the original story, called "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie". Surely James Mulholland, an English professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, would offer evidence that secondary degrees in history and English aren't a fool's errand. Surely he would suggest that the economics of academia isn't so dire.  read more »

... And sometimes it is "an accurate barometer of the national mood," according to The Economist. The paper has plotted out an intriguing history of America in cigar consumption ("Puffing on a stogie went into sharp decline after the Wall Street crash. President Kennedy signed the Cuban trade embargo in 1962 but not before sending a lackey to purchase 1,200 fine Cuban cigars on his behalf.")

But what may be especially interesting are the comments, particularly the "most recommended" ones. The lion's share of recommendations went to two comments:

One by reader Cýur de Lion, who quoted Rudyard Kipling:

"A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

(A pity Arturo Toscanini's far more charming quip doesn't seem to have been considered: "I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. I haven't had time for tobacco since.")

The other by a reader named Ben Hollis, who writes:

"I think cigars are wonderful - they make wealthy people impotent."

It seems we can't help ourselves: cigars may be stretched as symbols of economic confidence, but they will always seem most comfortable nestled somewhere with Freud.

Despite having hosted the Winter Olympics twice before, only on Sunday did Canada succeed in winning a gold medal on its own snow-covered soil. The medal itself, earned by Alexandre Bilodeau, a champion mogul skier, also represented a unique environmental achievement in Olympic history, as it was made in part from recycled materials. Specifically, the medal included metal salvaged from the circuit boards of electronic devices, otherwise known as e-waste.

Bilodeau’s medal—along with the other 614 Olympic medals and 399 to be awarded at the subsequent Paralympic Games—helps to both highlight and combat the growing environmental problem posed by e-waste. Electronic devices that were once considered luxury items are becoming as commonplace and personal as toothbrushes. Because they contain toxic heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and beryllium—as well as recyclable metal and plastic components—safely disposing this flood of phones, computers and televisions when they break or become obsolete is a challenge.

By teaming up with Teck Resources, a Canadian mining company, the creators of this year's Olympic medals—Omer Arbel and Corrine Hunt, both Canadian designers—have brought new attention to the issue and prevented 6.8 metric tonnes of e-waste from ending up in landfills.  read more »

Just add snow—the more, the messier. A few wet, white flakes in the Washington metro area are all it takes to wash away the veneer of efficiency local politicians try to maintain. When faced with nearly 30 inches of snow, as it was last weekend, America's seat of government freezes up.

As the virulent debate over health care has made clear, America's legislative process already moves at a glacial pace. The near record-setting snowstorm has not only suspended the city's semi-reliable buses and commuter trains, but has halted all congressional momentum (such as it was) for two days straight. Only the centre lanes of most important thoroughfares have been ploughed, leaving Congressmen, lobbyists and well-paid bureaucrats stranded in the suburbs. Cars that ventured out on unploughed roads packed the snow between the wheel ruts into block-long medians. Wet snow snapped branches off magnolia trees and stately pines; broken boughs still clutter the sidewalks in many neighbourhoods.

In defence of Adrian Fenty, the city's mayor, administrators everywhere struggle to cope with extreme weather. In Britain any break from the despairing rain causes officials to panic. Closer to the DC, the governments of Maryland and Virginia exhausted their snow-removal budgets even before this latest storm had hit. They could take a page from the government of New York City, which stretches its municipal dollars by hooking ploughs to the front of its biodiesel garbage trucks.  read more »

In an inspired move, our colleagues over at Democracy in America, The Economist's American politics blog, compared President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech to the work being done over at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they are trying to repair a Picasso painting that was ripped by a clumsy visitor. It's hard to restore broken masterpieces, just like it is hard to restore the promised glory of Obama's presidency, now that it has been tainted by the nasty work of governing.

The president has been in a tight spot—the kind of place he tends to emerge from, Houdini-like, with some masterful speechifying. But this has proven much harder in office, where the nitty-gritty of policy must inevitably displace the beauty of promises. So instead of dazzling us once again with skilful oratory, he delivered a speech that has been generally derided as ho-hum: smart, pragmatic, overlong and unstirring, bogged down in numbers and wonk.

Were we entitled to expect otherwise? How can a president both make decisions and rise above their messiness? Isn't this what we complained George Bush did with his insidious "War on Terror" narrative? Junot Diaz put his finger on this visceral, childish yearning for a good story in the New Yorker:  read more »

Some may worry that this blog–itself firmly encamped in digital media–is becoming a cyber refuge for old-fashioned, papyrus-loving cranks. Guilty. But I harbour no deep-seated distaste for screen-based media. While I will miss paper, its persistence is not my main worry. Rather, it is the journalism that paper supports that I fear for.

Until the old newspaper barons–the few that remain–can sort out a business model that does not rely on print advertising and subscriptions, I will remain sceptical that an adequate amount of news gathering can survive. Actual news, what goes on in foreign lands and on our local high streets, still originates mostly from overworked and underpaid print journalists. Web-based new media is a wonderful dimension, and I benefit from it everyday. But it cannot replace the work of the dinosaurs.  read more »

Rows of sleek, black Lincoln Town Cars idling along the Financial District's dark and narrow roads were an unavoidable sight in the run up to the financial crisis. Such chariots were necessary to shepherd home Wall Street's dealmakers after long evenings in the office. But with the deals dried up, out of work bankers have returned to New York's Subway system, and thousands of drivers have turned in their car keys.

As director of transportation at Lehman Brothers, Donovan Wilson used to operate an in-house call centre to manage the dozen or so car-service vendors the bank employed. He now serves in a similar capacity for Barclays, a smaller bank (even with the additional units from Lehman's bankruptcy sale), which itself kept only two black car companies from its six-company stable during the boom.

Companies that have managed to hold on to their corporate accounts have also struggled in the wake of the financial crisis. Berg Haroutunian is the owner of Vital Transportation Inc, one of the seven car vendors Merrill Lynch used before its ill-fated merger with Bank of America. Vital still works with the reconfigured bank, but he estimates that business has decreased by about 30%, and 120 of his 440 drivers (all independently contracted) have left "for one reason or another." Some had their cars repossessed, others have lost their homes.  read more »

We've questioned its relevance, we've paired it with Mozart, we've wondered at its news-reporting potential and we've praised its powers for delivering jokes.

Now it's time for us to use Twitter the way everyone else seems to: to tell people what we're doing.  "Follow us", as the kids say.

Picture credit: Abigail Silvester (via Flickr)

When dealing with intractable and often tragic problems, it can be difficult to focus. AIDS is an epidemic that kills 2m people annually. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most rampant, 1.9m people are infected each year. Between 31m and 36m people around the world live with HIV. These numbers are enormous and abstract, depressing and disempowering. Why think about it at all?

World AIDS Day on December 1st is a forced spotlight–a deadline for all of those official reports and announcements and lectures of what we've done and what we still must do. The day (and the weeks leading up to it) brought some good news: according to a new report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the number of new infections each year has gone down by 17% since 2001 (the year the UN began devoting itself in earnest to fighting HIV/AIDS). Antiretroviral drugs have also helped to lower the death rate and curb the spread of the virus. Good news, yes, but also a bit like spitting into a well.  read more »