Tony Curtis is dead and a little bit of me has died too.  He was one of the iconic male film stars of the 1950s.  I suppose he was not as big as Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, and he was certainly not an actor of the caliber of Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracey.  But he had real star appeal and there was something truly endearing about the Bronx accent, especially when he was dressed up as a Roman slave in a short tunic.  Above all, he was one of the stars—along with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe—of the funniest American movie ever.  I first saw Some Like it Hot in the summer of 1959, the year it appeared, and I last saw it earlier this year on DVD.  I show it regularly in my film course, Philosophy and Film, alternating it with the funniest British movie ever, Kind Hearts and Coronets.

For those of you so culturally deprived as not to know the plot, like the best farce, it is...

In response to revelations that her LinkedIn profile features false claims about attending Claremont Graduate University and the University of Oxford, Republican candidate for the United State Senate Christine O'Donnell issued a statement through a P.R. firm alleging that other, unknown persons created her false LinkedIn profile back when she was a little-known cable news commentator/ex-anti-masturbation activist, and, moreover:

Perhaps a more important educational issue for Americans is the government takeover of the student loan industry, passed as part of the Obamacare law. This ill-conceived, unconstitutional government monopoly has thrown into jeopardy thousands of jobs in the private student loan industry. Even worse, now college students have nowhere to go for their student loans except the same people who brought them TARP and the embarrassing federal BP oil spill response....

Journalism programs are under pressure these days, and articles like this one by Andrew Ferguson don't help their cause.  But college students interested in the field have a worthy option in the new Student Free Press Association.  It's a group made up of college-aged reporters and opin-ers operating in print and online media, supported by veteran journalists.  Here's the mission statement:

I’d like you to imagine the following. Suppose we are going to have a national summit on health care. Do you not suppose that a substantial number of the voices included would be from professionals in health care, including doctors and nurses? Would you have three people with just the head of the AMA to represent doctors?

Or how about legal reform – would not lawyers scream if such a conference were organized without a substantial portion of the main participants being members of the profession representing the range of opinions within the legal field?

Why then is it when it comes to education that people think it is appropriate to have major discussions about education without fair inclusion of the voices of those who bear the greatest burden for the education of our children, the parents and the teachers? --Kenneth Bernstein, Cooperative Catalyst

So I tied off my upper arm and mainlined...

I said I’d have one more post on the problem of wealth, but I’ve changed my mind, and I have two. I’d like to take a moment here to ponder the just-released Census Bureau report in which we learn that the income disparity between rich and poor in the United States has increased yet again. America now has the dubious distinction of having the greatest gap between the rich and poor among Western nations. The top wealthiest 5 percent of American families earned more than $180,000 last year—an increase from the year before. Meanwhile, the median income was down more than $1,500 from the previous year. Oh, and one in four American families today earns under $25,000.

If this keeps up, we'll have to wake up Tocqueville from the grave to have him rethink his proposition that history is moving inexorably toward equality. Or perhaps the wealthy in America can keep on pulling the wool over the eyes...

It's one of those days: I can't believe how trapped I feel, how overwhelming every task appears, and how lousy my hair looks. It's all tangled together, of course, this sense of being unequal to the task of making it through the day. Trapped, overwhelmed, and unattractive: The Monday Trifecta. The fact that it isn't even Monday only makes it worse.

And I'm the humor lady, right? The irony isn't lost on me. I'm the one who spends her time talking about how fabulous everything is if only you can only see how the absurdities of life add to—rather than detract from—our lives. Hahaha. Ha.

OK, so let's figure this one out, shall we?

Let's start with the hair. It probably looks no different to anybody except for me, if only because not one person on earth is thinking about the top of my head. So what if I think I make Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein look like she's...

In my last two posts, I explored what I thought were the practical and ethical implications that come with wealth—how much happiness derives from possessing it (Aristotle), and how much time accumulating and maintaining wealth takes away from truly important things (Leonardo da Vinci). The problem of wealth goes beyond a matter of economics, and to permit the national discussion about how much to tax the wealthy to rest entirely with the economics of taxes excludes broader, equally important ethical questions about how we should live. In this third of what I’ve decided will end up being four posts on the problem of wealth (yup, one more is coming), I’ll offer a cursory look at how the Judeo-Christian tradition sees wealth. (I know too little about Islam’s attitude toward wealth, other than that one of its five pillars is to care for the needy, to comment on it.)

The wealthy are all...

The dust rose like a bad smell,

getting onto my hands, into my hair,

all over myself. The edges of photographs

crumbled as I touched them. My hands seemed

to hold such power: I chose to look at him,

put her down without even asking names, pick

up this group, ask questions.

Whole lives

are summed up in  "He died before he was thirty--

that happened then"

as if we spoke of a hundred

thousand years ago, when animals roamed untamed,

instead of eighty years ago.

Houses still stand where these people were born.

Only one face, a young woman's, stares back at me

as if I'm making trouble.

She is surrounded by infants;

they grow like mushrooms all around her.

Not one smiles. Dressed in white, this was an event

for them; what happened after the photographer

sent them all home? Did the children

tear off clean clothes to run and play

in alleys and backyards? Or was...

A few weeks ago, President Obama delivered a speech in Virginia, and at one point he made a curious assertion about taxes.  He was quoted in the Boston Globe:

"We could get that done this week," he said. "But we’re still in this wrestling match with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell about the last 2 to 3 percent, where, on average, we’d be giving them $100,000 for people making a million dollars or more — which in and of itself would be OK, except to do it, we’d have to borrow $700-billion over the course of 10 years. And we just can’t afford it."

Note the word "giving."  That's an odd take of tax payments, one that reverses the order of transfer.  When a government doesn't take revenue from citizens, the logic goes, in effect it "gives" that money to them.

Is this just a rhetorical phrase designed to build support for letting the Bush tax cuts expire?  Or is it a case of ideological...

Late last spring I accepted an invitation from Cat Warren, a literature professor at North Carolina State and the new editor of the AAUP magazine, Academe, to contribute to an issue she was putting together on assessment and accountability in higher education -- Assessing Assessment.  The issue has now appeared, in print and online, including my piece entitled "Beyond Crude Measurement and Consumerism".  I had not previously met Cat, but I enjoyed working with her and have found I learned a lot from reading what my "collaborators" (we never communicated except with Cat) have written.  Since this is the journal of the AAUP, the focus of most of the essays is of course on what the professoriate should make of assessment, and that is certainly the problem that most interests me.

I have long worried that most of us (certainly me) have thought of undergraduate education primarily in terms ...