A few days ago in The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout laid out the bad news. In the last Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, an ongoing project of the National Endowment for the Arts, jazz underwent a significant loss of audience, and a further "graying" of the audience as well. Teachout summarizes:

"These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up and take ­notice:

• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.

• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older—fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.

• Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a...

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...

Colleges have gone the route of advertising, marketing, networking, social networking, blogging, and on and on to attract undergraduate applications.  After all, the more apps they get, the more selective they can be, which raises the U.S. News & World Report calculation.  But as schools offer state-of-the-art gyms, spotless dorms, high-tech classrooms, "diversity," semesters abroad, and promises of success, the expectations they raise may haunt them.

Here's one case, a story at CNN headlined blankly, "Alumna sues college because she hasn't found a job."  It's about a recent graduate of Monroe College in the Bronx.  She's angry because after paying $72,000 tuition to get a degree in Business Administration, specializing in information technology, she hasn’t received any job offers.

In her words, "Office of Career Advancement did not help me with a full-time job placement. I am also suing...

Last week in The Chronicle Review, I wrote that in several areas of the humanities, scholars are facing (or not facing) an identity-shaking prospect. It is that their objects of study have received so much critical attention in the last 50 years that further attention, at least of the same kind, is unnecessary. After 100 books on novelist X, do we really need #101?

Perhaps a tiny coterie of experts in X will take a look at it, but it won’t change the teaching of X in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the United States. Lay readers of X won’t bother with it, and once it enters the library the chances are good that it will never leave the shelf. As for buyers, if you take away standing library orders, sales of literary monographs to individuals hover in the mid- to low-two figures.

You can find a mass of data and references here, in a paper I did for American Enterprise...

In the Chronicle Review, Brian DeLay has a thoughtful discussion of the war on drugs, placing it in light of border wars in the Southwest 160 years ago. At one point, DeLay has a clear summation of the war, one that recognizes that it isn't an answer to the problems of drug abuse, but a compounding of them.

"The drug war is born of law. According to estimates by the United Nations, roughly one in 20 adults worldwide uses illegal drugs—and nowhere more than in the United States, where the vast market for illicit drugs remains immensely profitable. Prohibition has failed. What it has done is deny drug producers, distributors, and consumers access to the protections and conveniences of the legal marketplace."

A week ago, The New York Times sponsored a forum in response to an article in The New York Times Magazine about marijuana addiction. It had five leading voices, each one an expert in...

It's a longstanding problem, but it bears repeating, this time in words from Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct:

"Arts encounters with morality and politics are made difficult by the fact that moral and social systems require rules to be observed and obeyed.  Moral or legal systems essentially ask that people be good, and prefer (or require) narratives to promote that end.  Art's most essential requirement is not that the characters it fictively portrays be good but that they be interesting."

A few years earlier, Harold Bloom told Charlie Rose, "I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions." (See http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3614849423230018899.)

They underscore a debilitating situation for educators trying to sustain the arts in the secondary school curriculum.  How do they justify them?  Other subjects have ready-made ...

Thomas Jefferson hated journalists. So did George Washington. Abraham Lincoln gave his opinion once in a Cabinet meeting. As his secretaries debated a policy, someone said, “We have to consider the press, they’re so unreliable.”

Lincoln: “No, the papers are reliable. They lie, and they re-lie, and they re-lie. They’re altogether re-lie-able.”

And yet, they put an independent press at the center of freedom. They knew that the halls of power are dark and restricted, and without vigilant journalists in action, the people who occupy them will slide into corruption.

But investigation takes time and money. With newspapers closing (one company that runs three small New England papers just shut down), circulation declining, and info-tainment, punditry, and bloviation displacing serious reporting, investigative journalism falls down the priority ladder.

Private citizens can help.

...

Two days ago I stepped inside Santa Monica City Hall to tape a show of Connie Martinson Talks Books. The guest before me was Mike Farrell, of M*A*S*H fame, and he stated that 40 percent of the prison population in this country is incarcerated for drug crimes, most of them for marijuana.

How much money, I wondered, is spent arresting, indicting, prosecuting, transporting, imprisoning, guarding, feeding, clothing, and rehabilitating them?

The answer is compounded by a marijuana legalization bill before the California senate that, if passed, would provide nearly $1.4 billion in revenues each year. Here’s a story on it in the Orange County Register. It cites a study by the State Board of Equalization that “estimates...

In discussions of ideological bias in academe, critics have often made the mistake of exaggerating the radicalism of faculty members. When they claim that the professoriate, at least in the softer fields (humanities, arts, less-empirical of the social sciences, ed schools), is a bunch of Marxists, feminists, and identity politicians, they miss a crucial component of a faculty career: conformity. To make it through graduate seminars, hit the job market, get published, join a department, serve on committees, and win tenure, you can’t be an independent, outspoken mind. Or rather, whatever outspokenness you possess, it must follow the standard pieties, which means that it isn’t outspoken at all.

Too much depends on the opinion of peers and superiors — readers’ reports on submitted manuscripts, teaching evaluations, “collegiality,” tenure votes. This is a formula for groupthink, not...

Of all the criticism heaped on Sarah Palin back in October and again this month — much of it insufferable — not one of them is as decisive and hard-hitting as Peggy Noonan’s statement yesterday in The Wall Street Journal. Much of it deserves citation.

On Palin’s post-convention tour:

“She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: ...