It is astonishing how young a woman may be and yet be thought of as old, and how old a man may be and yet be thought of as young.

I’ve been considering it. A lot.

This started after I had my gallbladder removed, although I don’t think that everyone necessarily experiences this as a side effect.

When I was recuperating (already I’m introducing a wonderfully youthful phrase, right?), I caught the end of one of the world’s best movies, Sunset Boulevard.

Enthralled, I watched it for the 20th time, but — and this is the crucial factor — for the first time in about 10 years.

Let me ask you: Without checking — no Googling now, no going to IMDB — how old would you say Norma Desmond is?

C’mon, be honest? When she’s clutching her neck, gritting her teeth, having lost her mind...

“OK, folks, where’s the real aid? It’s here! No, it’s here! No, it’s here!” In an article titled “To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything But Aid,” the New York Times reports that: With the economy forcing budget cuts and layoffs in higher education, colleges and universities might be expected to be cutting financial aid. But no. Students considering a wide range of private schools, as well as those who are already enrolled, can expect to get more aid this year, not less. The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation’s smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and...

President Obama’s address this week turned out one of the biggest viewing audiences ever for a chief executive’s visit to the chamber. But while people at home were admiring Obama’s delivery and accepting or rejecting his statements, some in the seats in front of him were doing something else.

Here’s the story by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. Several members of the House and Senate came to the occasion equipped with real time digital tools, and before and during the speech, they sent out “content,” what they saw and heard and judged. Or, as Milbank puts it, “They whipped out their BlackBerrys and began sending text messages like high...

President Obama’s Access and Completion Incentive Fund, which will help large numbers of low-income students graduate from college, is part of a larger package of reforms including the elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) — that is, the program in which the federal government guarantees and subsidizes student loans made by banks and other for-profit companies. Under the plan, the federal government would lend the money directly, as it already does for many students. The savings would be used to...

President Obama’s FY 2010 Budget Proposal includes the following:

Focuses on College Completion. It is not enough for the Nation to enroll more students in college; we also need to graduate more students from college. A few States and institutions have begun to experiment with these approaches, but there is much more they can do. The Budget includes a new five-year, $2.5 billion Access and Completion Incentive Fund to support innovative State efforts to help low-income students succeed and complete their college education. The program will include a rigorous evaluation component to ensure that we learn from what works.If enacted, this could be a very big deal. The federal government provides higher education with a lot of money, but nearly every penny comes in the form of tax...

Duke University’s Mark Anthony Neal discusses “the greatest singer you’ve never heard,” Linda Jones.

In 1967, at the tender age of 22, Jones recorded a powerful song titled “Hypnotized.” Jones died in the early 1970s, but her singing style made quite an impression on subsequent generations of vocalists.

Neal wrote an intriguing essay on her ability to represent physical and emotional pain through her stylized and sophisticated vocalizations. Jones suffered from diabetes and painful diabetic seizures, and Neal uses Elaine Scarry’s Bodies in Pain as his inspiration for an argument about the extent to which Jones’s “harsh” and hypnotic sound represents her concerted attempt to render that pain acoustically and...

Naomi Watts in King Kong

Say what you like (actually, please don’t; it’s just an expression) but I’m absolutely tickled by the picture that Eric Shansby drew as an illustration for the column Gene Weingarten and I did for last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine.

As you might have read in my previous post, the management at the paper (I imagine them as the group which, in academic life, would comprise the deans, vice presidents, and provosts of our world) were scared that Shansby’s illustration might be offensive to some readers.

Since nobody contacted me directly, I’m imagining I was not...

It did little for my digestion this morning when I opened The New York Times to Patricia Cohen’s article entitled “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” The context for the article is all too clear, since as Cohen notes, “previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term ‘humanities.’” She follows up by citing the decrease in jobs available in literature due to university hiring freezes and other budget cutbacks, but of course that decrease is pretty general across the liberal arts. And it will get worse. Within the last few days I have received repeated messages from friends at other research universities reporting cuts in operating...

One of the most important education lines in President Obama’s speech was: “We will expand our commitment to charter schools.” This is best understood not in terms of any particular public policies but rather in terms of the awesome power presidents have to define the boundaries of public debate. To see evidence of this in education, we need go no further than Obama’s predecessor. Education was one of the most important issues in the early pre-9/11 Bush presidency, with intense negotiations around the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which ultimately led to No Child Left Behind). As Nicholas Lemann described in a terrific New Yorker article, in mid-2001 the press was mainly focused on one issue: vouchers. This was understandable; the...

If you go to this YouTube site, you’ll find a segment of Bill Moyers’ Journal devoted to conservative talk radio and its incitement of hate. The springboard is a murder in Knoxville. A man walked into a Unitarian church and opened fire, killing one man before parishioners wrestled him to the floor. The killer was deranged, and one motive was, according to police, his “stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

He targeted the church because, among other things, the narrator says, it “openly welcomes gays and lesbian and transgendered members.” And the vitriol spilling from conservative books and talk radio spurred him on, the show asserts.

But a recent Washington Post story calls into...