My daughter Phoebe sent me a link to a Web site today whose beauty and profundity took my breath away. In the subject heading, she wrote one word: “Fascinating.” Staring at the pictures on the Web site actually altered my brain.

Like almost everyone alive today, I see the 1940s in America through the lens of black, white, and gray. Why? Because so much of the era was recorded either in black and white photographs or black and white film. Should you choose to scroll through the 70 photographs on this Web site, you’ll encounter the 1940s portrayed in brilliant, shocking color. Photographers participating in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information program took the photos. (The Farm Security Administration was a program that put photographers to work during the Great Depression; it started with studying how rural America lived, but later it expanded into a program whose...

It’s hardly surprising to read that half of all Americans oppose the plan to build a 13-story mosque and interfaith community center two blocks north of Ground Zero. Americans were traumatized by the sudden, terrible, brazen attacks made directly on American soil by fanatical Islamicists. Couple this with the fact that many (if not most) Americans are nominally Christian or Jewish, or de facto secular, and know next to nothing about Islam, and out comes a sloppy conflation of the actions of a relatively small group of Islamicist radicals with Islam and Muslims in general.

Yet that collapsing of distinctions is no different from seeing all Christianity as fanatical because of the actions of its fringe.  Mind you, Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (the latter calling on “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the mosque as an “unnecessary provocation”—as if peace-seeking...

Man, these survivor shows are popping up everywhere. Did you read about the one in Malaysia with the wannabe imams? And now there’s one about us academics.  Called Survivor: Academe, it’s on The Learning Channel (2:00 a.m. Tuesdays). If you missed the first episode, I can tell you all about it. It’s a lot like Bravo’s Work of Art and Project Runway, only instead of artists or fashion designers, it has five assistant professors from the Cultural Studies Department at Westbrook College, a small, select liberal-arts college in New Jersey. (I know, I know, it’s a crazy place what with so many assistant professors in one small department.) They’re vying for the double grand prize of tenure and an office with a window.  

On the first episode, the five contestants were nervous wrecks. One guy fussed obsessively with his goatee, and one of the women kept reaching up to twiddle her Peruvian...

Less than half a century after John Erskine taught the first college course based on “Great Books” (also known as the “Western canon”), confidence that higher education curricula could center on “Great Books” collapsed. Neither Allan Bloom’s passionate defense of a “Great Books” curriculum (in The Closing of the American Mind, 1987), nor Harold Bloom’s offering of a great critic’s particular list of great books (in The Western Canon, 1994), were able to prevent higher education from sliding over to the “smorgasbord” approach, where students choose to study whatever they want.

Except for a few pockets—St. John’s College, Annapolis, Columbia University, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at The University of Texas, Austin—there are few places today where people think of college as a time and place to study “Great Books.” All eyes are focused on future...

By nature, I’m averse to all forms of nostalgia, and am therefore pretty adept at avoiding beginning sentences with the words, “When I was a child …” The other night, however, a few of us in the over-30 crowd sat around remembering what it was like to go to grammar school back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. We had all gone to public school, and we each had stories about what it was like. Here’s a sampling.  

1. Kids divided into reading groups with such names as, “Bluebirds,” “Robins,” and “Sparrows,” where “Sparrows” was code for, “Barely reads,” “Robins” meant “mediocre, probably doomed to be this bird forever,” and “Bluebirds” meant “smart and knows it.”

2. A core curriculum centering on Fun With Dick and Jane books.

3. A married kindergarten teacher who, without explanation, disappeared all of a sudden. Later, I was with my mother in the supermarket when we ran into her. It was shocking...

A few days ago, I read a "Culture Monster” (the L.A. Times art blog) post on a controversial YouTube video, made by Jane Korman, an Australian artist. The video shows Korman, along with her father, Adolek Kohn, who is a Holocaust survivor, as well as other children in the family, dancing at Auschwitz. At one point, Kohn is in front of an oven, wearing a t-shirt with the word “Survivor.” The family dances to Gloria Gaynor’s seventies hit, “I Will Survive” (given its basically trivial lyrics, the song is especially jolting).

There have been lots of comedies making fun of the Holocaust, most notably, The Producers, and there are countless Holocaust jokes. But can you actually go out and dance on the graves of those murdered at Auschwitz and somehow make it move people? I’ve watched the video several times now, vacillating between thinking it’s an outrage and thinking it’s a...

Although I lean left politically, I can’t help but see how many liberals, despite their intelligence, reason and learnedness, manage to steer themselves into ditches. Such is the case with Martha Nussbaum in her column, in today’s New York Times, on the several European movements to ban the burqa (the full body garment worn by some Muslim women that includes veiling all of the head and face save for the eyes). Posing the question, “What is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance?” Nussbaum writes close to 2,500 words probing what it means to treat people with “dignity,” especially in terms of respecting their religion, and especially as it pertains to whether or not European parliaments ought to enact legislation banning the burqa. Unfortunately, she never considers the possibility that European culture and history might affect our...

Click through the 12 photographs taken by Jessica Hilltout in today’s online Art & Design section of The New York Times, and see what you think. The Belgian-born photographer spent several months before the World Cup games traveling around Africa snapping images of dirt-poor Africans who are passionate lovers of soccer, along with their makeshift soccer fields and soccer equipment. The pictures reveal what human ingenuity, when coupled with a deep desire to play soccer, can come up with, and are currently on display in galleries in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Brussels.

Look particularly closely at the pictures of the different variations of soccer balls. They’re cobbled together from nothing but detritus. It looks like the materials used include everything from leftover plastic and twine, to burlap, rocks, and mud. The results yield honest and handsome-looking balls that look like what...

Who was the greatest American president? Starting in 1982, Siena College has been publishing periodic surveys of presidential scholars to find out how they rank American presidents, from top to bottom.  There have now been five surveys (this year’s was just published). In each survey, Franklin D. Roosevelt ended up ranked greatest. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln have alternately been ranked second greatest, but this year Teddy Roosevelt beat them both out for second place. (The pollsters explain Teddy’s rise by saying, "Teddy Roosevelt had, more than any other president the 'right stuff', and tops the collective ranking of a cluster of personal qualities, including imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck, background, and being willing to take risks.”) Meanwhile, George Washington? He’s never risen above being ranked in fourth place.  

Fourth? George Washington fourth? After...

For the past couple of years, I’ve eagerly started off all my Wednesdays by reading Olivia Judson’s science blog at The New York Times. This morning, she informed readers that she’s going on sabbatical for a year. No one can begrudge her this breather. She’s been blogging about biology more or less relentlessly for the past two years, with only one break that I can remember (in her absence, she invited wonderful guests to blog for her as substitutes). Still, for admirers like me, this is a sad day.

Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is not merely a blogger. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College, London, and the author of the knowledgeable, award-winning and extremely comic, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex. She uses her blog to write lovingly and informatively about an enormous range of topics in biology—...