As an empty nester, it is now easy for me to reflect upon the joys of parenting. The greatest joy, of course, is watching that beautiful little baby grow and develop into the complexity of an adult human, replete with gifts we celebrate and quirks that, undoubtably, come from the lineage of the other parent. But the second greatest joy may well be the way that our F2's challenge us to rethink our past assumptions, to see the world in a different way, to learn something that we never before found interesting, and to rethink our priorities and sense of world order. With that, I want to share a lesson I learned from one of my own sons, in part because this lesson might be helpful to others, and in part because I hope it causes you to take a moment to think of your own child's wisest...

I’m back from my quick trip to Santa Barbara to spend an evening with the trustees and faculty of the Cate School (which is actually in Carpenteria, just up the coast from Santa Barbara). Cate is a century-old private boarding high school. It has 265 students and 63 faculty members, and the most beautiful school location, atop a seaside mesa, that I have ever seen.

The Cate faculty has been reviewing the School’s curriculum, which is currently heavily skewed to Advanced Placement courses. They offer 21 A.P. courses, and this past year 124 students took at least one of the courses, while 110 students took 238 A.P. exams. They do pretty well -- 85 percent of the students earned a grade of 3 (on the...

At first I thought that multitasking was just a bogus concept, on the one hand an obvious truth and on the other an obvious falsehood. If multitasking meant reading a book while listening to music, of course it happened, and had happened long before the term "multitasking" ever came along. But if multitasking meant talking on the phone while doing email, or doing homework while watching TV, or carrying on six chats on your laptop -- no way. Those activities exercise the same parts of your brain, and in order to do them you don't multitask, you switch-task.  And the bad part is that in the switching process you have a warm-up time with the new task before you reach full engagement with it. Doing those things at the same time actually ends up taking longer than doing those things one after the other.

But the dangers of multitasking go beyond inefficiency.

Whenever I have to drag my abstract paintings around, I find myself longing to be a poet. (Ever hear of a poets throwing out their lower backs from carrying around books of poems?) Then I remind myself that at least I’m not a sculptor. Whatever problems abstract painters face -- physically, in having to move around heavy, but fragile, flat rectangles, and intellectually, in finding a way to make abstract paintings that move anyone other than art worldies -- pale in comparison to what abstract sculptors face. In this post and the next, I’ll discuss contemporary abstract sculpture -- the yin, you might say, to the yang of abstract painting.

The painter Ad Reinhardt once remarked caustically that sculpture is that thing you bump into when you step back to look at a painting. (We painters can be an arrogant bunch, that’s for sure.) Centuries earlier, in his...

Newsweek has published a mini-debate (the "Student Loan Smackdown") between for-profit bank representative John Dean and myself, on the subject of whether Congress should pass President Obama's plan to redirect $8-billion in lucrative subsidies for for-profit banks to Pell Grants and other worthy causes. Dean says "No!" while I say "Yes!" Newsweek went with "Yes."

Apparently the standard tactic($) of spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign contributions isn't working, because Dean is now saying that the legislation "adds $1-trillion to Treasury borrowing over 10 years." In a time of exploding budget deficits and growing national debt, that seems pretty scary. Why would Obama...

Hi, Miroslava, I'm your "childless academic peer."

I read Professor Chávez-García's article called "Superprofessor Meets Supermom," and I could only think about how absolutely middling my own ambition and performance has been in comparison to hers.

I have to say that I was bothered by Professor Chávez-García's rather smug -- or at least it seemed that way to me -- reference to her envy of her "childless academic peers": "Unlike my childless academic peers, I do not have the luxury -- and, yes, it is a luxury I covet -- of spending all my time conducting research or simply thinking about the significance of my work."

Do you think that just because people don't have kids they don't have lives?

Do you think that somehow not having a...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

During last week's massive 10-campus walkout, several dozen students and workers occupied (video) the Graduate Student Commons at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), issuing statements frankly acknowledging their intention to escalate the conflict: "Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles," they note at their website, "We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over."

Their supporters aim to initiate some actual thought about the role of higher education in the economy. "A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors," observes the author of the compelling

(Please see correction in fourth paragraph.)

Rice pudding. A new Rorschach test: some see a nostalgic dessert; I see a recession indicator.

The stock market might be doing better; but the real economy is a swamp; unemployment is scarily stuck; The New York Times reports the gap between job openings and job seekers is at record highs. Unemployment is mostly permanent loss: income never to be recovered; detachment from work habits and skills; and much higher rates of mortgage and credit-card defaults. These are losses that devastate families long after an official recovery starts. And, more people are taking early...

William Safire died of pancreatic cancer today. He was 79. His obituary appears here. After retiring from the Times, he went to work heading the Dana Foundation, among other things supporting the work of the National Endowment for the Arts (and showing himself in gatherings to be an entirely unassuming guy).  He wrote great speeches for Spiro Agnew, which I cited last year on Brainstorm here, but he turned into a hard critic of secrecy in government after learning that his boss Richard Nixon taped meetings he attended. And one of his best analyses of political secrecy appears in this op-ed on Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan. Remember when...