President Obama's 2010 back-to-school address is notable largely for lack of controversy. Apparently, by now most Republican pols have gotten the word: psst, on education, he's on our side! The message—if you can call it that—(noses to the grindstone, kiddies!) was deliberately free of any content that could be directly related to the upcoming midterm elections. In stark contrast to last year's hoopla, this year's talk wasn't even covered by many major newspapers.

The speech didn't just steer clear of the midterms—it downplayed Obama's own education initiatives, and his controversial education secretary, present at the speech, was only mentioned in the introduction. Anything about policy or funding—the unpopular "signature" program, Race to the Top? Not a word. It's usual for the location for these sorts of things to signal a reference to the pol's accomplishments, but this time...

Slow dissolve: Manhattan, 15 years ago. I walk a few blocks from my place on Third Street --  next to an anarchist squat, across from the NuYorican Poets Cafe -- to the headquarters of the Modern Language Association (MLA), then in Astor Place.

I explain the agenda of the Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) to the director of the association, Phyllis Franklin. We want MLA to educate the public about the majority contingent workforce.

Inspired by a California law that set 75 percent as a minimum standard for classes that should be taught by a full-time stable faculty, even in its community colleges, we want MLA to establish educationally sound full-time/part-time ratios in the disciplines it represents. 

We want the association to lobby for those standards with accreditation agencies and to urge the other big state governments like New York and Texas to follow California's lead.

We want MLA...

New York isn’t Calcutta, and begging isn’t all that common here. Even so, because I ride the subway almost every day, I come face-to-face with beggars all the time. Some subway beggars are regulars—like the scruffy guy who makes his plea on the early morning uptown A-train, or the legless man (who looked for sure as if he’d done military service) who used to work the No. 1 train. Wearing an old cowboy hat, he used his muscular arms to push himself along. His stumpy thighs, balanced on top of an old skateboard, and his beggar’s cup clutched between his pursed lips, made even the most pitiless passengers pull out a quarter. Like a lot of regulars, he simply vanished one day. Gone, like that.

Beggars like to step into a subway car like heralds bearing an important proclamation. Usually, it goes something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m homeless and I’m...

All my friends are going to wonder what's wrong with me. I was supposed to be the smart kid and now I'm working as an adjunct and a freelancer and I'm not married and the part I really hate is that I'm not married and I wish it didn't bother me. I'm not sure why it bugs me as much as it does. Maybe because I thought the last guy was IT, you know? I thought we would get married. So when he said ‘I don't know whether we should renew the lease' I said ‘I know we've had a couple of rough patches recently, but I don't think that this means the whole thing is over, I just think that we need to work on stuff -- maybe even go to counseling.' But he said it just wasn't on his agenda.

So I left before he could leave. That was a joke, too, right? Because he drove me out. I mean, if a roach leaves your apartment after you fumigate, it doesn't mean the roach decided coincidentally it was the right...

Yes, this year is the 40th Anniversary of the War on Drugs, which began as a Nixon-backed social program to stop the flow of marijuana into the country. The Obama Administration has rightly dropped the "war" phrasing, but this story doesn't bode well for its future actions. It's out of El Paso, and it reports that "Two key Obama administration officials opted out of this coming week's Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs." Here's what the El Paso County Sheriff said:

"I don't know why you're all so surprised about the federal government's unwillingness to address this because, quite frankly, they've ignored the problem for years, and that's why we're in the situation we're in now."

One wonders if this is another case of political leaders shying away from realistic drug policy out of "softness" fears. But with most of the population in favor of relaxing marijuana laws, it...

Here at Slate, Christopher Lane, a Northwestern English professor who's turned his research onto the diagnostic profession, takes aim at "The Diagnostic Madness of DSM-V" (as the subtitle says).  According to Lane, the cardinal reference work of the American Psychiatric Association, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is due out in its fifth edition in 2012.  Compare it to the first version, a "thin, spiral-bound edition" from 1952, and it looks like the entire population has undergone an explosion of pathological conditions.  Right now, the DSM contains three times as many disorders as the first version did.  Have researchers genuinely discovered them? Have circumstances since the 1950s made people more iseased?

The third edition from 1980, for instance, included "more than 100 new mental disorders," such as "social phobia," which encompassed symptoms such as...