Slow dissolve: Manhattan, 15 years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street --  next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe -- to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.

I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.

Inspired by a California law that set 75...

My fellow Brainstormer Gina Barreca’s recent post on the "B student" who thought he was an "A student" reminded me of the story told me by a friend who teaches literature at an Ivy League university. He had a student who came to him complaining about a poor grade on a paper. After spending 45 minutes going over the paper, my friend thought he’d more than adequately explained its multiple problems. At that point, the student looked at him and said, “That’s your opinion.”

The failure to distinguish between argumentation and opinion made reasoning with this student a hopeless proposition. Much of the time, all is well and good without the use of reason. Daily life is built on a platform of habit where we barely listen; the point is to be polite and sociable rather than reason through every little thing that comes along. Most days, we...

Sometimes it is fun doing the right thing.  A Princeton alum of the class of 1950 had come by to talk to me about philanthropy (one of my research interests) on one of his trips to attend Alumni Council meetings on campus.  He is a distinguished lawyer and, it turns out, one of the most civically minded citizens in Birmingham, Alabama.  He recently got in touch with me and asked me to speak to the Princeton Club of Alabama.  I agreed to make the trip both to please him and to assist the University, flying down on the 28th and back on the 29th of January.  I told him I was quite happy to meet several groups of people there, and he took me at my word.  Shortly after my arrival at midday, I met with a group of about 15 judges, lawyers, and local law professors...

Why is there so much difficulty and controversy surrounding campus speakers? To be sure, only a small portion of the overall pool becomes a problem -- David Horowitz, Bill Ayers, the Minuteman founder, etc. -- but why should invited guests ever push administrators into cancellations, presentation conditions, added fees, and other odd stipulations? What are they afraid of?

The handling of David Horowitz by St. Louis University is a case in point. People might remember that, several months back, his talk was cancelled, and recently a new wrinkle has come up. Here is Horowitz' version:

"The administrator in charge, Dean Scott Smith, had told the student whose group had invited me that 'Horowitz would never be allowed to speak on a platform alone at Saint Louis University. He could be invited only if there was another speaker on the program to oppose his point of...

President Obama recently released his budget and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell rendered his opinion: "more spending, more taxes, more debt."

Go Mitch. Things are looking up!

It's hard to say anything reassuring when a smaller percentage of adults are working than ever before - the employment ratios are just above 55 percent -- and one out of 10 people who want to work can't find jobs. Nevertheless Friday's unemployment numbers didn't show much worsening -- though, as the Economic Policy Institute points out, long-term unemployment is stubborn and scarring. Falling family incomes can cause children to delay or forgo a college education, sluggish demand can stop the...

A year and a half ago, my husband and I decided to take the plunge - literally - and live out a dream we had been discussing for more than 12 of our then 22 years together. The idea first came to us during a 10th anniversary trip to Paris when we saw the river barges on the Seine. I think it was the rooftop gardens that appealed to me most, whereas it was the efficient use of every nook and cranny that became the focus of my husband's attention. After all, he is the one who sketched out every apartment or house we ever lived in -- to scale, using graph paper -- so that he could plan with great precision where each piece of furniture would go well in advance of moving day. Or maybe it was just the romantic idea of the people we imagined to be living on those boats, and the life stories we attributed to them, that stole our hearts and minds. Regardless, on a cold January day in...

Everyone loves dinosaurs.  Last weekend, when my son Edward and I were in New York City to go to the opera, given a couple of free hours in the afternoon, he headed out to the Museum of Natural History to gaze again at those monsters of the past.  As I discovered on a trip last year to the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, even the biblical literalists are fascinated by these long-gone behemoths. One of my favorite cartoons explaining their demise 65 million years ago shows two dinos stranded forlornly on an islet in the middle of an ocean. They are looking at Noah's Ark floating away and the one turns to the other and says: "Oh crap! Was that today?"

The dinosaurs are back in the news. Because they are the ancestors of the birds, we have long known that some of them had to be feathered. Where you draw the line is almost a matter of taste, but it is clear that just...

The New York Times reports (as did the Washington Post last week) that the Obama Administration's student-loan reform package is in jeopardy. This is unsurprising. The current federal student loan system involves the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the public treasury to private corporations through a sweet deal of locked-in profit margins and guarantees that taxpayers will make good on loan defaults. Because the loan bill, having passed the House of Representatives last year, has been held up in the Senate for months pending the resolution of health care, that's given private banks and loan companies plenty of time to take some of the tens of...

For teens (12-17-year-olds), blogging is down and networking is up. That's the finding in a new report from Pew Research, whose Internet & American Life Project is one of the longest ongoing survey initiatives out there. The summary appears here.

While 28 percent of teen users in 2006 claimed that they keep a blog, that number now stands at 14 percent. And while 76 percent of them claimed in 2006 to comment on blogs at social networking sites, we are now down to 52 percent. For all adult users over the same period, the numbers haven't much changed.

Meanwhile, while 55 percent of teen users went to socal networking sites in Nov 2006 and 65 percent of them in Feb 2008, we are now at 73 percent. That is one point higher than the rate of 18-29-year-olds who network. Overall,...

The late Stephen Jay Gould was best known for his brilliant essays, "This view of life," that he published monthly in the journal Natural History. He also wrote many books and I think the most interesting is that on the Burgess Shale, those long-extinct, soft-bodied organisms whose fossils can be found in the Canadian Rockies. However, Wonderful Life -- the title obviously taken from that sentimental drivel we are forced to watch every Christmas -- is, thank goodness, a lot more than its namesake and indeed a lot more than just a discussion of marine invertebrates that faded out over five hundred million years ago. 

For a start, it is a pastiche of a baseball book. The average work in this genre...