Kanye West has just released his latest CD, 808s and Heartbreak, an instrumentally pared-down and techno’d-up attempt to voice disillusionment about his recent breakup with his fiancée (several months ago) and the unexpected death of his mother during elective plastic surgery last year.

West if probably best known (especially to folks who aren’t big hip-hop fans) as the celebrity who blasted President Bush during a national telethon because of the government’s slow initial response to Hurricane Katrina. “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” he said. The comment caused quite a stir, and even compelled him to lampoon himself on a subsequent episode of Saturday Night Live.

Kanye’s newest offering is an introspective (some might say, solipsistic) attempt to articulate his sense of...

A couple of weeks ago I attended the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History. The meeting was held at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, one of Canada’s oldest hotels, these days somewhat faded in its elegance. But Ottawa is one of my favorite Canadian cities, and I am always happy to have an excuse to visit. I am also always pleased to go to the ASLH, since legal history is formally my specialty — though not the field in which I do most of my writing these days. I had not been able to attend for several years, since I was serving a term on the Council of the American Philosophical Society which, like the ASLH, meets each year the week before Thanksgiving. I like the ASLH meeting because it is a small group of scholars (about 300 came to Ottawa) with a great many common interests — unlike the American Historical Association, which serves an entire...

Sarah Palin is coming to my state to campaign for Saxby Chambliss in the high-stakes runoff election for senator. Chambliss should hope that few college students show up. That’s because most of them don’t like her and don’t respect her.

The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed as much days before the election. In a poll of college students conducted by CBS News/UWIRE/Chronicle, when asked what they think of the vice-presidential candidates, fully 54 percent stated that they “Don’t much like her.” Only 20 percent gave her a “Really like her.”

Those numbers look even worse in light of party affiliation. Of the 25,000 students polled, 44 percent aligned with Democrat, 28 percent with Republican, 28 percent with Independent. In other words, Palin scored well below...

The Friday after Thanksgiving is called “Black Friday” because it’s the day companies traditionally see their books move from red to black. Many Americans treat Black Friday as if God himself ordained that they should go shopping. I myself have always loathed the day, since I am easily enervated whenever I’m in crowds.

This morning, in a Long Island town very near where I teach, a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death. The 34-year-old temporary, part-time employee (this was Wal-Mart, after all) was knocked down by a surging mob at 5:03 a.m., when the doors opened to “customers” who had been waiting to get in. He was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour later. The news reported that before the doors opened, people had been pushing and shoving and...

The influence of technology on individual lives and culture in general is one of the pressing issues of our time, and one of the best voices on it is Christine Rosen. For five years, she has published articles in The New Atlantis and elsewhere on how digital technology, particularly in communications and entertainment, affects personal behaviors and social realities. Mixing historical contexts going back to the 19th century, recent neurobiological research, and her own cultural values, Rosen has taken on one technology advent, trend, tool, and myth after another, composing pointed and eloquent arguments and commentaries that form a nice counterpoint to the techno-enthusiasm so common in popular discussions. Here is a sample:

In

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Turkey at the top is always intensely competitive. This year’s contenders included first runner-up Robert Felner, the U of Louisville dean indicted for conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in what the feds allege are repeated acts of embezzlement of grant monies amounting to over $2 million. Not content with these escapades, Felner racked up 31 grievances and complaints in his 5 years at the “U of L” but was consistently backed against the faculty by upper administration, especially Provost Shirley Willihnganz and President James Ramsey, who spent extravagantly on lawyers and consultants to prop up his administration despite...

Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days — 90 at the outside — before I’d heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in the eye as a distraction from the pain. I believe the medical term for this is “Thomas Friedman Syndrome.”

Outliers is a good book in many ways, and says a lot about education. It’s a critique of the standard narrative of extraordinary success, those inspiring tales of hard work and gumption that are often used to explain the achievements of sports stars and...

Hi. My name is Kevin Carey, and this my first post to Brainstorm. It’s a privilege to be blogging for the Chronicle and I’m looking forward to becoming virtually acquainted with my fellow contributors. Brief bio: I work at a Washington, DC-based think tank called Education Sector. We’ve been around for a little over three years, working on a range of issues from pre-K through higher education. I manage the policy team and also handle the bulk of our postsecondary work, which is how I ended up here today. I have a B.A. in political science from Binghamton University and master’s of public administration from Ohio State. I spent the first six years of my career working in the Indiana statehouse, advising the Democratic caucus of the state Senate on fiscal issues, and then as the assistant state budget...

When I showed this video to a few friends, including one from my Cambridge days (a Norwegian scholar of 18th-century British literature who is over here doing research at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington — and she’s a wickedly brilliant woman with a particularly astute eye for satire), they thought I was showing them a parody.

They did not believe the video of Sarah Palin’s interview at the turkey farm in Alaska was real.

They shook their collective skeptical heads and said “Gina, you’ve been deceived. Tsk, tsk. You should know better. Surely this is a hoax?”

It isn’t.

I’ll warn you: it’s a messy video in several respects. Live turkeys are rendered, well, unlive in the background as Palin, interviewed by a local television station, describes her delight at being back in...

The Rhodes Scholarships were announced this week, and one of Penn’s Anthropology students, Abigail Seldin, was among 32 Americans to receive the coveted award this year. Abigail is an amazing student (working on her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in anthropology at the exact same time), and she has conducted some powerful ethnographic and archival research among the Lenape nation in Pennsylvania.

Abigail has played a significant role helping to curate an exhibit on the Lenape at University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archeology. That exhibit, “Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania” will be up for display until Fall 2009. It is well worth checking out.

Congrats to Aligail! And enjoy Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

This...