Posts by Noted

June 16, 2011, 02:32 PM ET

Sports and the Revolt Against Masculinity

By Noted

As you've probably read by now,

Rioting hockey fans clashed with police officers, set vehicles ablaze, smashed windows, looted stores and set several fires in downtown areas here Wednesday night, moments after the Vancouver Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals to the Boston Bruins.

Yeah, yeah, we all know that hockey is a fight disguised as a sport. So perhaps most people are shrugging their shoulders about the riots in Vancouver. After all, what can we expect from such a supposedly violent sport but violent behavior from its fans? But hockey is not necessarily more or less violent than other sports. Let's face it, football and rugby ain't for sissies. On the other hand, soccer is not the manliest of sports, nor is it even a contact sport, and yet its hooligans are some of the most violent—they regularly riot, burn cars, and beat the crap out of each other and the police. ... Read More

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April 27, 2011, 09:09 AM ET

An Artist Has Got to Know His Limitations

By Noted

While reading a New York Times article about how music affects emotions only when human beings inflect it with their own individual timing, rather than performing it to technical perfection, I stumbled across a lone sentence about artistic style that was so brilliant and clearly true it stopped me in my tracks. The country singer Roseanne Cash quoted her father, Johnny Cash, saying, “Style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.” Cash was talking about music, but there’s no doubt his insight pertains to other arts. It certainly pertains to painting. To think artistic style derives from artistic limitations is, at first glance, backwards. After all, doesn't talent explain greatness, and limitations explain mediocrity? Isn’t artistic style achieved by overcoming limitations—especially through mastery of skills? In the article on music in which... Read More

April 14, 2011, 07:55 PM ET

Danger: Code Pink

By Noted

Is there anything more dangerous than a boy not knowing he's a boy? After all, a boy who doesn't know he's a boy might grow up to be gay or even a girl and what could be worse than that? Why it's unheard of, ungodly, and downright un-American. At least that's what all those experts on healthy gender development over at Fox news are telling us now that they've seen Satan in a J. Crew ad. The ad features J. Crew President and Creative Director Jenna Lyons painting her son's toenails hot pink. It features the line "Lucky for me I ended up with a son whose favorite color is pink." Fox News trotted out not just their usual outrage, but the weight of psychiatric experts as well. Keith Ablow, who blogs at Fox News, appeared wearing a pink tie (note: pink tie yes; polish no) to announce that painting a boy's toenails pink will result in gender anarchy. At his blog Ablow lays out his argument:

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The London School of Economics Was Warned

By Noted

The late Fred Halliday, the stellar and courageous scholar of Muslim worlds who died last year, tried to convince LSE, where he taught international relations for many years (and was Director-Designate of the LSE Middle East Centre, 2006-2008), not to take one-and-a-half million pounds from the Qaddafi Foundation. The excellent international site Open Democracy, with which I have been associated for the 10 years of its existence, just ran his dissenting 2009 memo urging the school to turn down the grant. Halliday wrote prophetically and with an analytical acumen vindicated by recent developments:

Much is made by supporters of the [Qaddafi Foundation] grant of the fact that Libya is changing internally. This may or may not be the case—it is simply much too early to say. Certainly, the overwhelming balance of informed press conference, and the reports of human rights...

Spring Break Confessions

By Noted

Hi, my name is Naomi and I confess I've never gone on spring break. Unless you count a visit to my grandparents at Century Village in Boca Raton. I am fascinated by the whole bikini-clad, underage drinking ritual, though, and so I enjoyed The Wall Street Journal's column today on spring break at Panama City Beach, Florida. Apparently there are a lot of people in these spring-break destinations who are less than thrilled with the yearly influx of drunken 20-year-olds. Netta Puskar, general manager of Coral Reef Condominiums, an 82-unit development where four-bedroom condos go for $450 a night in high season, says she won't rent to anyone under age 25. Last month, she brought in a sheriff's deputy to live on the property. "A patrol car is just a good presence to have," she says. I bet. Sorry to sound like a scold on my first Brainstorm post but really? The behavior is so bad that she has... Read More

January 9, 2011, 11:03 AM ET

Law Schools: Tournaments or Lotteries?

By Noted

I think David Segal's flashy and inevitably much-e-mailed Sunday Times piece on law schools ultimately represents a missed opportunity. There's some good stuff about rankings competition and how law schools continue to expand, charge high prices, and generate large profits even as the market for lawyers contracts. But he takes the easy way out by mis-portraying a tournament as a lottery. Segal repeatedly characterizes going to law school as a form of gambling, "like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long-line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a game that few of them can win." Yet nearly all of the students, he notes, "are convinced that they're going to win the ring toss at this carnival and bring home the stuffed bear." Segal acknowledges that this argument is "complicated by the reality that a small fraction of graduates are still win... Read More

December 28, 2010, 07:25 AM ET

More 'Who Needs French' at 'The New Republic'

By Noted

A few weeks ago in The New Republic, linguist John McWhorter offered his take on foreign languages and recent developments in higher education. His argument is that French, German, and Italian are just fine as minor academic subjects, but to “bemoan” their loss of turf at SUNY-Albany and elsewhere is to hold on to “fraying traditions.” On the affirmative side, he says that we live in a new global condition that sets Chinese and Arabic well above French, German, and Italian (not Spanish), so “A university of limited resources that has majors only in Chinese and Arabic should be a perfectly normal proposition.” That is an arguable proposition, and curriculum deciders in the future will hash it out on the grounds of money, student interest, and faculty pressure. McWhorter doesn’t provide much useful material for anyone involved in those efforts here except to say, precisely,... Read More

December 13, 2010, 12:57 PM ET

Are These the 30 Funniest Books?

By Noted

It’s a dreary day, so I thought I’d indulge myself and come up with a list of my favorite comedies. A caveat should be offered here, however: This is not a fancy English-professor-y list of the finest, most exquisitely crafted, most erudite or intellectually sophisticated works on paper in the language. This is a list of the books that make me laugh until my mascara starts to run. These are books to read over your first cup of coffee or just before you go to sleep. OK, I'm going to get schmaltzy, but a day in which you have laughed is day you have not wasted. Most days—knock on wood—life itself presents enough to humor us, but there are days when you need a jump-start. These books offer exactly that kind of infusion of comic energy. I rely on them to get me to smile or laugh even when nothing else does the trick. Some of these books you’ve already read. But perhaps on... Read More

December 7, 2010, 08:04 PM ET

Gainful-Employment Regulations: Coming Soon to a Campus Near You

By Noted

New regulations from the Department of Education, including the Program Integrity and proposed Gainful Employment regulations, essentially reduce the value of higher education to a single metric—the starting salary graduates earns in their first jobs. Never mind the fact that, for most of us, our first job was neither indicative nor predictive of our lifetime earning potential, or that we wouldn't have even gotten that entry level job if we didn't have the credential that distinguished us from the other applicants. No—if a graduate's first job doesn't pay a salary that justifies the cost of the degree, then the program fails the test and students who depend on federal financial aid can't enroll in it. Sure, this time around the regulations are aimed at career and vocational programs, which serve as the primary point of entry into higher education for low-income students. These... Read More

December 1, 2010, 02:04 PM ET

Why Would Anyone Go to an Elite College?

By Noted

Are fancy-schmancy schools like the one where I teach worth it? A new discussion at The New York Times says NO! According to the Times,

The key to success in college and beyond has more to do with what students do with their time during college than where they choose to attend. A long-term study of 6,335 college graduates published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that graduating from a college where entering students have higher SAT scores—one marker of elite colleges—didn't pay off in higher post-graduation income. Researchers found that students who applied to several elite schools but didn't attend them -- either because of rejection or by their own choice—are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools.

So if clawing and pushing your way into an elite school doesn't pay off, why do we do it? What causes the... Read More