MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
I'm Robert Siegel, and it's time now for your letters. Some big-name universities, including Stanford and Cornell, are making a play to set up a new graduate school in New York City. Yesterday, I spoke with Daniel Massey of Crain's New York Business about the bid for the Big Apple and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ambition to make it the tech capital of the world.
DANIEL MASSEY: The city is offering up to $100 million in infrastructure improvement costs, and the city is offering a piece of land - Roosevelt Island, the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Governors Island - or applicants can propose their own sites. And he's hoping to make the city into a Silicon Valley.
BLOCK: Well, Neil Weiser of Redwood City, California, is an alumnus of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Though he now lives, as he says, in the shadow of the Stanford campus and doesn't doubt its reputation, he writes this: New York does not need to import a program from the West Coast or even the upstate side of New York. It needs to take fuller advantage of the institutions and programs, faculties and students that already exist within its borders and spend the city's money aiding them to create world-class facilities so they can better compete with the out-of-town schools for students and research dollars.
SIEGEL: Also, last week, we heard from our movie critic Bob Mondello about the proliferation of Hollywood remakes. There have been more than a dozen already this year. As we heard from Bob, Hollywood can remake "Footloose" and "The Thing," but Gary Dorman of Washington, D.C., writes in to tell us: Nobody but nobody can remake Bob Mondello.
BLOCK: Amen to that. As Bob pointed out in his story, remakes have been a staple of the music industry for years, and Joann Lee Frank of Clearwater, Florida, thinks that's a good thing. She says that Aretha Franklin's cover of "Respect" surpasses the original written and recorded by Otis Redding. But she writes: When it comes to Hollywood movie remakes, Marvin Gaye put it quite nicely in a song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING")
SIEGEL: Well, you can always keep it real with us. Just go to npr.org and click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AIN'T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.