Primary Inversion (Asaro, Catherine) 1995

A mostly promising first novel.  There's a lot of clunky over-exposition of the "I JUST USED A WORD I MADE UP AND WILL NOW EXPLAIN WHAT IT MEANS" type, and there's some awkward plotting to get everyone important in her life "on stage" at some point during the book, and the middle of the book drags, but when Asaro gets to the places where she's just writing and not worrying about hitting her next plot point, it's pretty good.

Class of 2012 and no early decision

The latest Tiger E-News had the headline "Freshman class ranks as Princeton's most diverse" with the text:

"
Princeton has enrolled the most diverse freshman class in its history for the third consecutive year, selected from a record-high number of applicants following the University's transition to a single admission process. The class of 2012 includes record representation of students from minority backgrounds and international students, has the highest percentage of incoming students to receive financial aid and, for the first time in University history, is evenly balanced in terms of gender.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/15/15O66/
"

If you follow the link, the article goes on to give numbers about how various indicators continue to shift slightly in the direction of greater class diversity, but the most interesting number shifts aren't acknowledged: 

                2012    2011    2011ED   2011RD
                -----------------------------------
#applied        21370   18942   2276     16666
#admitted        2122    1791    597      1194
%accept          9.93    9.46   26.2      7.16
#matriculated    1243    1246    597       649
%matriculate     58.6    69.6    100      54.4

(ED=early decision; RD=regular decision; also note that the article says there were 1838 admitted to the class of 2011; however that doesn't match up with the 9.4% overall acceptance rate; http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2007/05/18/news/18499.shtml shows the correct(?) number of 1791.  Early decision numbers taken from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/64/75S14/index.xml?section=newsreleases.)

At any rate, no surprises that the total number of applications were up and the overall matriculation rate was down.  At first I was a little surprised that the overall acceptance rate actually went /up/, but suppose that's an artifact of the increase in the number of applications not catching up with the necessary increase in the number of admissions (due to a lower overall matriculation rate) to obtain the "correct" number of incoming students.

I was also initially surprised that the matriculation rate for the class of 2012 was so much higher than the rate for non-early decision students in the class of 2011, but then remembered this is probably due to the fact that there are a certain number of people in the class of 2012 who knew they really wanted to go to Princeton and would have enrolled early decision had that option been available.

Something to keep an eye on as the kids get closer to college age, and of course fun for anyone who likes to look at numbers.  Now I want to go hunting for the Harvard rates...

Charlotte Gray (2001)

We love Cate Blanchett.  We really like Billy Crudup.  There's nothing at all wrong with Michael Gambon.  So why were we underwhelmed by Charlotte Gray?  Probably because it's just a war drama with a very mediocre script that goes completely flat by the end, stretched to a 2 hour running time, and the actors can't seem to rise above it.

Lost in the Funhouse (Barth, John) 1968

Even the author's introduction is precious!  Look, I'm all for experimentation, but if I'm reading your writing, ideally it should be within a story you're telling, and not simply an exercise.  Too many of the short stories in this collection are simply exercises; this is too bad, because the Ambrose tales have experimental elements (nearing the point of pretension in "Lost in the Funhouse") but also tell interesting stories.

Juno (2007)

The darling independent film of 2007, we watched Juno with high expectations, and largely they were met. The dialogue struggles whenever they try to use "CURRENT TEEN SLANG!" and we're completely unbelieving part of the ending (see below), and Allison Janney's and Jennifer Garner's performances are a little cartoonish (maybe it's just how the characters are written?), but the movies succeeds with a number of plausibly written and honestly acted scenes.

spoilers


The fact that Juno wants to get back together with her boyfriend who offers nothing during the first 8 months of her pregnancy (other than not staring at her belly) doesn't work. It's not that I don't believe that they couldn't get back together, it's that I don't see that feeling adequately explained from Juno's perspective, and it's too big a plot point for me to simply accept.