January 25, 2012, 05:31 PM ET

Where's Your Diploma?

Where’s your diploma? Is it magisterially framed and displayed with due pride and ceremony on your office wall? Is it part of a row of impressive documents in your home, standing square-shouldered next to your partner’s diploma, as if in a family portrait? Is it still stuck inside the blue cardboard folder it came in somewhere under a book in your parents’ library? Is it hanging in your bathroom, behind a door, so that nobody ever sees it but you—and even when you see it, you’re not exactly at your best? Or was it lost in a move, burnt by an ex, peed on by your dog? Know those ads saying “It’s 10 o’clock: do you know where your children are?” Well, it’s 2012: do you know where your diploma is? Do you care? The only diploma I have framed is the honorary doctor of humane letters degree I received from Shepherd College in 2000. It never occurred to me not to have... Read More

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January 24, 2012, 10:34 PM ET

If This Is Art, Your Middle-School Daughter Is Picasso

According to a piece in the Harvard Crimson: "Eric R. Brewster ’14 and Avery A. Leonard ’14 fought off drooping eyelids and the urge to sleep last week as they held a phone conversation that lasted for 46 hours, 12 minutes, 52 seconds, and 228 milliseconds—potentially setting a new world record." Those wacky Harvard kids! Trying to break world records in their spare time. But wait! This stunt is so much more than that. It's an "art installation," according to the organizers. It was actually "the premiere creation of the Harvard Generalist, a new student arts cooperative." How was this art, you might ask? "Stage Manager Ginny C. Fahs ’14 said that the performance was much like an athletic competition because it required extreme endurance from Leonard and Brewster. 'This explored deterioration—physical, mental, and emotional,' Fahs said. 'Because of that deterioration, the... Read More

January 24, 2012, 04:22 PM ET

Political Aphorisms for 2012: Chicken or...

For years, everything I believed about American politics could be summed up in the following Gore Vidal bon mot:

America's not the only one party system, but it's the only one party system with two right wings."

That more or less held true till the Dubbya years, when one of the wings went so far right it was no longer accurately described as a political party as much as a social movement fueled by Christian conservatism and funded by corporate interests. Fortunately, another political aphorism arrived just in time for the 2008 presidential election, this one by humorist David Sedaris, who described people not committed to voting for Barack Obama thusly:

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of s#$t with...

The Good News about Sex

“Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” Well, I’m gonna try … to tell you why sex exists. And not just on some enchanted evening (or morning, afternoon, or middle of the night). In my last post, I outlined some of the downsides of sex as a means of reproducing. Having shared that bad news, here is its antidote, the most likely biological upside of carnal unions: When a random sample of one-half the genes of one parent is combined with a comparable sample from another, each resulting offspring is genetically different from either parent, as well as from one another. It appears that therein resides the payoff of sex, in the glorious and highly adaptive production of genetic diversity. Of course, the fundamental source of said diversity is mutation but mutations are rare, occurring on the order of once in a million or so... Read More

January 23, 2012, 11:22 PM ET

Temperate in Tampa: The GOP Cools Down

In comparison with the recent ructions in South Carolina, tonight's GOP debate in Florida was a fairly sedate gathering. Most of the sparks were generated by a few solid Romney v. Gingrich scrums. The former, reeling from recent lackluster debate performances, came out kickboxing and tarred the latter as a Freddie Mac lobbyist, an "influence peddler," a Washington Insider and a pretty damn embarrassing failure as Speaker of the House. Gingrich, for his part, repulsed the assaults, never losing his cool. Though at one point, he did something unusual and expounded on Romney's debate strategy: "I understand your technique, which you used on McCain, you used on Huckabee . . . " I can't recall the last time I saw a candidate engage in an analysis of another's rhetorical craft. Odd. But effective. Gingrich is becoming formidable-r with each passing debate. The Speaker also played... Read More

January 23, 2012, 03:38 PM ET

The Fall of Photography

Last week, the International Center for Photography in New York opened an exhibition of works by the great street and crime photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), professionally known as Weegee because of his Ouija-board prescience about arriving at crime scenes so quickly. Also last week, Eastman Kodak—the company that made the kind of film Weegee and other major modern photographers relied on—declared bankruptcy. The end of traditional film photography was augured in the early 1990s, when digital cameras first started being sold, but Kodak’s demise signals yet another step in the march to its doom. It demonstrates that for all the darkroom holdouts, most people today use digital cameras for their photographs. Face it, darkroom fans, times have changed. Almost all images—including paintings—sooner or later land in someone’s computer. The whole world is pixelating, and hardly anybody...

Blogs and Term Papers

Here is a story in the New York Times about an issue in higher education writing assignments. It begins with Duke professor Cathy Davidson's aim "to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog." To Cathy, the long research paper is a "mechanistic" practice that "is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers." Others weigh in and defend the term paper, such as Douglas Reeves, founder of Harcourt's Leadership and Learning Center, who says, “Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market. It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.” And Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review, who attributes the... Read More

January 23, 2012, 02:01 PM ET

Upstairs Downstairs Vs. Downton Abbey

Were you to ask to ask me to describe myself, which you would never do, of course, being too well-bred, and were I to answer, which I would never do, I would perhaps say (rather modestly) that I fancied myself as terribly, terribly loyal. And you'll have noticed, from the rather odd diction of that appallingly ridiculous first line, that I'm also being terribly, terribly influenced at the moment by my recent watching of television programs heavily laden with the British sauce, don't you know. You see, darling, I wasn't sure quite sure whether or not I was really permitted to like Downton Abbey because, after all, it seemed so thoroughly and entirely based on Upstairs Downstairs that one could hardly turn a corner in the drawing room, open a door in the pantry, or sneak into the mistress's dressing room in the Abbey without entering Eaton Place first. You recall Eaton Place, don't ... Read More

January 22, 2012, 08:47 PM ET

Clueless in Times Square

The NYT's Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, remains clueless about the political reality of our time. (But I must immediately step up to confess factual error, committed in the interest of pith, for his office is in fact a few blocks from Times Square.) Earlier this month, he asked aloud "whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Said gaffe was worsened by the unwittingly hilarious headline slapped on it ("Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?") The letters that poured in were almost uniformly scathing, making it plain that Times readers had far outdistanced their anointed ombudsman in their understanding that if journalists do not correct the false claims they report, they are not journalists at all, but rather stenographers—or worse, to quote the late, great Jack Newfield on the ideal Washington ... Read More

January 22, 2012, 05:35 PM ET

Joe Paterno Has Died

Joe Paterno has died. His family confirmed his passing in a press statement released Sunday morning. Paterno succumbed to lung cancer, a condition for which he was being treated. He died at the age of 85—a legend to many Penn State alumni. According to the family statement: “He fought hard until the end, stayed positive, thought only of others and constantly reminded everyone of how blessed his life had been. His ambitions were far-reaching, but he never believed he had to leave this Happy Valley to achieve them. He was a man devoted to his family, his university, his players and his community.” To be sure, the legacy that survives Joe Paterno’s death will never be viewed as tarnished by those who loved and adored him the most. They will remember him for his victories in sport, his fortitude and staying power as a coach. Paterno won more games than any other major football... Read More