Rants and Raves for Sunday Opinion

Each Sunday I read The Times’ comics (a.k.a. Opinion pages). Usually this is at breakfast. Most of the time this usually demands an infusion of antacid. On April 3, however, I was unusually surprised, sort of.

The article by Karin Klein, “How I Gamed the SAT,” was great until the last sentence.

While I was reading it, I took her examples and was grading the article according to her scale. Until the end of the article, I had given her a 5, maybe a 6. However, she inserted a left-wing wacko commentary in the last paragraph. This was disjointed from the rest of the article. I downgraded her article to a 2 for inserting her political bent.

Regarding the article by Richard Rothstein, “Cheapskate Conservatives Cheat Students”: As the Democrats have been in power in California for so long, is he implying that they are conservative? The morning paper was saved by Sandy Banks for the great article “To Teach, Give It Your All.”

Jack Childs

North Edwards, Calif.

*

Why is Al Martinez’s thoughtful column buried in the daily Calendar section while the lightweight and often juvenile commentary of Joel Stein is featured in the Sunday Opinion pages?

Maureen Fancon

Thousand Oaks

*

The Outside the Tent feature (Sunday Opinion) is a “first” for the editorial pages of The Times: a must-read.

Jim Lucas

Santa Monica

*

Re “Hipsters Send Times Into Tizzies,” Outside the Tent, Opinion, April 3: Certainly Matt Welch has noticed the social systems breaking down all around us. Not all, maybe, but lots. Or maybe he only reads booster stories?

Everything we do now matters. Margins for error no longer exist or at least are much narrower. Writing that “consumption is not evil” is equivalent to “snow is white.”

Consumption may not “necessarily” be evil, but who will dare to tell our descendants a generation or two down the line that our habits of waste produced the disposable planet they live on? It need not have been so.

Rex Styzens

Long Beach