The French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois died on Monday at the age of 98. She gained international art-star status very late in life, beginning when she turned 70 (unknown, ambitious artists everywhere  take note—there's still time). Bourgeois’s art ended up in four Whitney Biennial exhibitions (to be chosen for even one is considered a huge deal for an artist) and in 1993, she was the American representative at the Venice Biennale—the most prestigious of the big international art exhibitions. Her work became the subject of a series of large retrospectives at several major museums in Europe and the United States.

Bourgeois’s art is jolting, disturbing and often bitingly witty, weaving together memory, loss, sex, and the nuclear family into art objects that are alternately freakishly bulbous (multiple breasts, cropped phalluses, cut-off limbs and torsos) or scary and spiky...

The latest on the never-ending Gulf disaster is that some 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day (not the 1000 barrels a day BP first reported) are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the subsequent failure of the blowout preventer. All efforts to plug the underwater well up to now have failed.

It doesn’t really matter who’s at fault or who’s in charge—whether it’s BP or the Obama administration—except in terms of money (who will pay what and how much) and politics (whether or not this catastrophe will stick like oil to Obama the way Katrina stuck to Bush). Despite everyone everywhere screaming “Fix it!” no one knows (as in possesses practical knowledge) how to fix it. Already the largest environmental disaster in American history, the gushing oil threatens to continue gushing another two months—right up until August, when a relief well that’s in...

I see from my last post on the Gulf oil drilling disaster that a few commentators found me too arrogant for their taste. In beginning and ending with a reference to the acerbic H.L. Mencken, whose opinion on the smallness of American intelligence is well known to all but the ignorant, I hoped to put in context my lack of confidence that Americans are prepared to tackle complex 21st-century problems, such as the necessity to “wean” (note that ubiquitously used word “wean" when people talk of Americans and their dependence on oil, implying, of course, that we are babies) ourselves not merely from oil, but from fossil fuels in general. (Too long a sentence, but you get the point.)

As every college kid does not know, the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day—almost half of it gobbled up by our passenger cars. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, we consume 2...

When H.L. Mencken observed that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, he was being kind. Americans offer their opinions willy nilly, on just about every topic under the sun, regardless of whether or not they know what they're talking about. We may not be readers or deep thinkers, but we sure don't hesitate to offer ridiculous opinions.

To see the failure of American education, in fact, you needn’t look further than American opinions. Half (half!) of Americans believe they have personal guardian angels. A fourth of Americans claim to have witnessed miraculous healings (does recovering from a cold count? If so, I’m with the program). God has spoken directly to a fifth of our people (not quite Old Testament times, but hardly the Enlightenment). Only 40 percent believe in evolution (it's hard to take, but come on, everybody, buck up). Half of American...

In a piece from yesterday’s Chronicle, we learn about a new study reported in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinity (I wonder if Harvey Mansfield subscribes) in which the authors conclude that men who behave modestly (meaning with some self-effacement) during a job interview “aren’t very well liked" compared to women who behave modestly in the same situation. In a previous study, the same authors had concluded that women who behave assertively are less likely to be hired (whether in comparison to less assertive women or men is not clear from the Chronicle report) even if they are competent. Men are expected to be alpha males, in other words, whereas women are supposed to be Harriet Nelsons. Surprise (yawn): Gender stereotypes are alive and well.

Although I'm fairly assertive, I am not all that competent (I'm modifying a joke made by the Chronicle author), and I failed to locate...

In reading the news on America’s immigration problems, as well as Brainstorm posts on the topic, I can’t help but notice that people who are most vexed about illegal immigration like to say things like, “they’re not playing by the rules,” or “they’re criminals,” or “they should be rounded up and deported” (these quotations are lifted from comments made on Brainstorm posts). Although I’ll get to why this is ridiculous in a moment, I first want to say that like many liberals, I would like to see secured borders as much as any citizen in Arizona. Even so, I am aghast at Arizona’s new immigration law. I’ve spent a lot of time in France (a place the kind of conservatives who came up with this law like to mock). There, the police regularly stop people and demand to see their papers. I used to proudly tell my French acquaintances that over in America we didn’t do that sort of thing.

According...

If you count my commute, which began with an 8 a.m. subway ride, today’s commencement was an all-day affair for me. Although I can think of better things to do with my Sundays, attending commencement is not that onerous an event.  I find it helps to see it as a party. But I don’t attend commencement for the sliced melon and the fat sugar cookies. Like a lot of the other faculty who regularly attend commencement, I go for a very simple reason: to have a few last flickering moments with graduating students and, perhaps, for another flickering moment, to meet their families. If even a few of my students catch me, or pull their parents over to meet me during the reception after the ceremony, I count my attendance a success.

But for one cockamamie, jive-ass reason or another, a lot of faculty members I know, both at my school and at other schools, don’t consider attending commencement a...

I just heard that television’s 20-year-old Law & Order has been axed. How can this be? How can NBC simply kill off the revered Law & Order? How will American civilization survive? Since the show was shot in New York, was all about New York, and had become, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, “a New York City institution,” a lot of New Yorkers were particularly fond of it. Yet Law & Order was much more than an inside New York story. It was a great, ongoing, all-American story about justice.

I must confess that I’m one of the ones who participated in its demise (it’s had very low ratings for a long time now.) A passionate Law & Order fan when it first started, I followed it for years—long enough to see Sam Waterston’s hedge-like brows turn from mink black to old gray. About three years ago, however, I couldn’t take it any more. I just plain grew exhausted dealing with all that justice. By the time I...

Like almost all New Yorkers, I move about the city via subway. At times it can be unpleasant—when a car is overcrowded, passengers bump more than elbows, and when it’s summer, they walk onto trains from hell if the air-conditioning is on the blink. Mostly, however, even though people complain about bad service and filth, I’m a fan of the subway. I get to zip around the city while stealthily observing, from behind the protective gear of sunglasses and my i-Pod, the Sublime Human Comedy.

In 1992, the MTA (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the public benefit corporation that coordinates and runs the transportation in the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey) imitated the London transit system by starting a sweet little program called “Poetry in Motion.” Sponsored and paid for by Barnes and Noble, the MTA posts short poems, or excerpts from poems, by famous and...

From what I understand, this week’s near meltdown of the stock market most likely came not from fat fingers, but from a computer program gone awry. In trying to figure out exactly what happened, I decided to start from the beginning. Economists, correct me if I’m missing something.

1. In order to get anything done in society, people need money in advance. This is called “raising capital.”

2. Some people are willing to lend money to people who have ideas for doing things. Say, for example, a guy comes up with an idea to build a better mousetrap and form a company to sell it to the mouse-hating public. Say he doesn’t have enough money to do this. He needs to find someone who has some extra money willing to take a flyer on his mousetrap idea. The guy with the extra money is called an “investor.”  In exchange for lending his money and taking a risk on the mousetrap, he asks for a return on his...