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...

Someone who does testing for colleges just informed me of a remarkable statistic.  Fully 70 percent of students who enter the Cal State system have to go into a remedial course. That's a figure higher than the national average, which puts around 29 percent of students in four-year colleges in remediation (and 43 percent for two-year college students).

They end up there because in certain subjects and areas, mainly reading, writing, and math, they are not prepared to handle college-level work.  If they were to enroll in a regular freshman course, they would earn a D or F. What this means is that colleges increasingly are obligated to provide pre-college, high-school level instruction.

And when we look at the success of those courses, we find that, of students enrolled in them, only 13 percent of them proceed to complete their career and earn a bachelor's degree. (See here.)

Something...

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. Here's a page from the New York...

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 Jordan was asked about his and his superior's role in obstructing justice in the Lewinsky case. I think the whole investigation was a waste of time and money, but the machinations of it all were fascinating to watch. Here is Safire on Jordan's actions in...

In the documentary film American Teen (see here and here), one episode shows a few girls blanketing their Indianapolis high school with a photo of another girl topless. She had sent it to her boyfriend and another friend, and it passed on to the others who sent it out on emails, text messages, and social networks, and even made a Web site out of it. A day later, when the girl walked through the hallways, she could be sure that every boy had her breasts up on his iPhone.

The remarkable thing about the episode, though, is that her tormenters have no compunction on camera.  They display themselves at their sadistic best for audiences to see in perpetuity. They leave her a voice message: "You're a slut, and everybody knows, your parents know, your priest knows, God knows" -- and giggle with glee.  Don't they realize how bad they look?

Sort of, yes, but in a world of Facebook, texting,...

"Our urban experts, planners, and social scientists generally . . . are people who are convinced that, if fully employed and given adequate budgets, they can successfully practice the art of making everyone healthier, wealthier, and happier."

"And a religious person doesn't 'believe' in God, he has faith in God. One's relation to God is existential, not rationalist. As I learned later from a reading of Kant, pure reason will never get you beyond -- pure reason. But the more you pray, the more likely you are to have faith. That is why children are taught to pray, rather than being instructed in 'proofs' of God's 'existence.'"

Of Clement Greenberg: "I recall vividly, for obvious reasons, his once offering to acquire a large Jackson Pollock painting for $10,000. It was a friendly gesture, but I declined. I didn't have ten thousand dollars, we didn't have space in our apartment for so...

One of the arguments of cultural-literacy folks make for a curriculum that identifies knowledge everybody must learn and books everybody must read is that those core materials are necessary for responsible citizenship. Over at the Education Gadfly, Checker Finn gives a prime example.  (Scroll down to the first entry, entitled "Health care and an educated citizenry.")

Finn cites three paragraphs from the speech President Obama gave to Congress on the health-care issue, italicizing key words. Obama said:

"I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health-care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John...

Anybody who believes that last month's town-hall meetings marked an unprecedented eruption of anti-democratic thuggery hasn't read much U.S. history. A glance at a gubernatorial debate in Columbus, Georgia, 1906, or at any one of 10,000 other political other political moments from 1796 forward would convince you that this summer's occasions were child's play. Only the gigantic and delicate egos of members of Congress plus the nervousness of journalists who saw ordinary citizens leaping ahead of their coverage raised the town halls to dark and fearsome populist status.

How it plays out now that legislators have returned to D.C. remains to be seen. But the historical ignorance of journalists should continue as an abiding concern of academics, and they should speak out with stern correctives. Two cases occurred last week.

Here is David Sirota on the Van Jones affair, claiming him as a...

It's been easy to cast Twitter as an avalanche of trivia, a new tool for narcissists, or as the latest step in the dummification of America. But then came the Iran elections. Protesters took to the streets with devices in hand, and they tweeted onto the world stage, sending messages, sounding warnings, and bearing witness. 

Observers were quick to voice its impact. NYU mew media prof Clay Shirky announced, "[T]his is it.  The big one."  He called the protests "the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media."

A blogger at The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder wrote a post entitled "The Revolution Will Be Twittered," and it stated, "when histories of the Iranian election are written, Twitter will doubtless be cast as a protagonal technology that enabled the powerless to survive a brutal crackdown and information blackout by the ruling authorities....

In recent years, in my narrow experience, I've noticed an increase in a troubling attitude among professors in the humanities toward the administration. More and more, they regard themselves as employees of an organization whose center lies not in the classroom or in the library, but in the administration building. In their eyes, the college "sits" most of all not in the course lecture, in office hours, in special collections, or in student study lounges, but in the dean's office, the provost's committee room, the meeting of the president with vice presidents.

That's a mistake. College isn't located in the administration building, and it's not a turf thing. It's an event, an activity, and it transpires when three parties interact -- teachers, students, and subject matters. A professor's encounter with a field through research and a student's encounter with a field through course work...