Recently, I had the chance to study -- and teach -- a couple of chapters from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (first published as separate magazine essays, then published as a book in 1869). How beautiful to have lived in a more intellectually innocent time when a man who made his living evaluating schools could become famous for arguing with gusto that a good modern society can come about only when all its citizens are educated in “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Can you imagine anyone getting away with that today? Theorists of all stripes would have a ball! Everyone enjoys quoting Arnold’s famous phrase, but only as a blast from the past. People especially like to undermine his idea by snottily asking, “And who, exactly, is to say what’s the ‘best that has been thought and said in the world’?”

I was nonplussed when a colleague with whom I was chatting about...

The recent, ongoing spam attack on Brainstorm looks nasty, penetrating all the way to the earliest posts. But seriously, Ugg boots? Are these spammers kidding? Who’d be caught dead in the things? They’re ugly little clunkers that make feet look like formless blobs, and are clearly strictly aimed at mindless teenagers with too much money in their wallets. Nike shoes? Tell me, truly, is there anyone who wants to wear anything with the word “Nike” on it when Tiger isn’t yet out of the woods? Cheap replicas of watches? Get real. Use your cell phone.

But this newest spam attack that just hit (see below) is even more pernicious than the ugly Ugg boot, Nike shoe, cheap watch attack. I’ve talked to people at the computer center and they’ve warned me not to even dream of clicking on any of the following links. DON’T DO IT. DON’T CLICK ON ANY OF THE FOLLOWING LINKS.

MLA Conference Earplugs
Cribbed...

The great state of Texas is about to change our understanding of the Enlightenment for its high school students. The State Board of Education rejected the old understanding of the Enlightenment--the one where students were expected to learn how to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” In its deep wisdom, the Board, in a 10-5 party-line vote, has just revised its social-studies curriculum.

The conservative majority has concocted a revision of the old curriculum that rewrites a fair amount of history, much of the time by subtly changing little phrases or substituting words like "leadership" for "role" when the text talks about a hallowed Republican such as Nixon, but occasionally by stepping in to effect a major overhaul....

I thought the Valley Girl thing was dead and gone. After the movie Clueless (an astonishingly good, if bizarre, rendition of Jane Austen’s Emma) had its run, and commentators had exhausted themselves venting over the injection of the word “like” in between every spoken word (I’m talking about the late 90s through, oh, say, 2007, rather than the Bohemian love of the word “like” in the 1950s), English seemed bored with the whole thing, and on the road to recovery. Sentences, it seemed, were beginning to return to a calmer state -- less hysterical, less frenzied, less packed with filler words and meaningless inflections.

So it was with deep shock that I heard myself lift my voice at the end of a declarative sentence the other day. In class, no less! Professor Fendrich, who never went through the “like” phase, and for whom the word “like” is the least-favorite...

How smart can a rock band be? Super-smart, that's how smart. If you have 2 minutes to spare, turn on your sound, click HERE, and enjoy a delightful rock n' roll romp through Western art history. The Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses, will delight anyone with even the least sense of humor and the littlest bit of knowledge about painting. I played this for my advanced painting class yesterday (a sort of on-the-spot midterm), and I’m here to report that my students passed this little exam with flying colors. My personal favorite is “Las Meninas,” but “The Raft of the Medusa" gives it a run for its money.

Tonight, millions will gather round the fireplace (AKA television) to tremble with excitement over who will win what at the Academy Awards -- that holy annual event where Hollywood, performing directly to its loyal fans, congratulates itself for the previous year’s work. Oscar night's competition, celebration, and glamour, stirred into a delicious TV brew, invites movie lovers to watch people they adore from afar -- people who make their living practicing the art of pretending to be other people -- pretending to not care all that much whether or not they win one of those strange-looking little statues.

Since I like, rather than adore, movies, I prefer to read about who won the next morning, after the tinsel is down. And though I think acting a fascinating human endeavor, and am as stunned as the next person at the raw talent some people have in luring the rest of us into a state of “will...

After arriving home from school last night, I read a long reader response to my post on why the idea of “consumer empowerment” (now used by everyone in the health-care debate) is wrongheaded. Commentator ledzep, arguing against my unapologetic liberal leanings on the issue of health care, concluded by saying it was not my “most responsibly argued piece” -- as if, like a teenager arriving home a little drunk, I needed chastising. Here’s my response:

ledzep (quoting LF): "Translation: Keep the bountiful profits rolling into the pockets of the private health-insurance companies." And how does the individual mandate do anything different from this? Even more, in fact - the profits will increase. Do you think the insurance companies are afraid of being given a captive market? The government is going to force young, healthy people into buying insurance - the insurance executives are...

Last Sunday, David Brooks said in The New York Times that to solve the mess that’s called “health care” in America, Republicans believe we need to “create a genuine market with clear price signals, empowered consumers and an evolving process.” Now, fellow “Brainstorm” blogger Diane Auer Jones chimes in with “We must empower consumers to make good decisions by providing them with more information about the options they have. …”

Ah, the “empowered consumer”! -- that unicorn invoked by the Republicans whenever a societal need that obviously requires some substantial government participation doesn’t jibe with their mantra that the market always knows best. Admitting no difference between “consumer” decisions involving, say, what sort of DVD player to order for the minivan and a working family trying to avert medical and financial disaster when a child falls ill, Republicans never relent in...

Having just finished studying Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the large group of freshmen in our team-taught “Culture and Expression” course was ready for the real thing. Lucky for us, then, that BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is in its second season of “The Bridge Project”—a three-year series of co-productions of classical theater by BAM, The Old Vic, and Neal Street, and that right now they’re offering The Tempest. Directed by Sam Mendes, the Prospero in this Tempest shows from the very start of the play that he’s exhausted with art. But to go into that would be to tell a different story from the one I’m going to tell here.

Our huge group of freshmen was divided into manageable groups who would see the play on a succession of evenings. From Hofstra, it’s a short train ride on the Long Island Railroad to the Atlantic Avenue hub in Brooklyn, where the train meets the subway, and from...

No matter that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world not to have universal health care. We Americans are different. We’re independent. We don’t need others -- especially our government -- telling us what to do. No less a giant than Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, “Self-Reliance,” gave us a clarion call (“trust thyself”) reminding us that real men make decisions for themselves.

The 19th-century Emersonian idea of self-reliance, slapped on top of 21st-century realities, yields a very odd result. On the one hand, many Americans -- especially Republicans -- deeply loathe “government nanny-state programs.” They argue that whenever the government interferes in the marketplace, people lose their sense of initiative and their freedoms, costs go up, and whatever was wrong in the first place simply gets worse. They say it’s best to leave as much as possible to the...