My fellow Brainstormer Gina Barreca’s recent post on the "B student" who thought he was an "A student" reminded me of the story told me by a friend who teaches literature at an Ivy League university. He had a student who came to him complaining about a poor grade on a paper. After spending 45 minutes going over the paper, my friend thought he’d more than adequately explained its multiple problems. At that point, the student looked at him and said, “That’s your opinion.”

The failure to distinguish between argumentation and opinion made reasoning with this student a hopeless proposition. Much of the time, all is well and good without the use of reason. Daily life is built on a platform of habit where we barely listen; the point is to be polite and sociable rather than reason through every little thing that comes along. Most days, we...

Social science conducts some very odd tests to try to figure out the motivations behind human behavior. While I still think literature is inherently more suitable to understanding the ways human emotions and desires work (they come in complicated mixtures -- love mixed together with envy and anger, pity together with disgust and shame, fear together with excitement, etc.) scientific studies with their experiments and statistics -- unlike literature -- yield the comforting illusion that we can rationally understand our only partly rational selves.

Take this recent, startling study reported in Scientific American last week: With remarkable accuracy, a group of subjects was able to distinguish between Republican and Democratic candidates for the 2004 and...

On Monday, I gave the opening lecture of the semester in an honors course in which I am team teaching with 11 other professors. (I give the first and last lectures and conduct two discussion groups; my colleagues give the rest of the lectures and conduct their own two discussion groups.) Although it was a lecture on a subject near and dear to my heart, and one I know very well (Leonardo's invention of indeterminacy in painting and drawing), and although I'd written and rewritten this particular lecture until I was quite pleased with the way it sounded, I was nervous. Even after I'd practiced it three times (making sure my words flowed nicely with the projected images), the night before, I was a little nervous.

Actually, I was a semi-wreck and falling asleep was next to impossible. I hadn't lectured to a large audience of students in a long time. I tossed and turned and my...

My husband and I have been avid Eddie Izzard fans since at least 1998, and for my Christmas present this year we bought ourselves tickets to see him do stand-up at Madison Square Garden on January 16th, his one and only night in New York. (For those of you who don't know about Eddie, he's the charming, lovable transvestite comedian with unrivaled verbal virtuosity who's also played Shakespeare, appeared in the movies, and starred in a modestly successful but brief TV drama, "The Riches.") In "Stripped," his current world tour, Eddie tackles the history of the world, with -- in his words -- "a few gaps." In his monologue (somehow, this modest-sized man commands 15,000+ at Madison Square Garden), Eddie is an atheist with a question mark -- a thinking man wondering about how God and Wikipedia fit together. 

Afterwards, aglow in...

In an exhibition entitled “The Visible Vagina” that opens simultaneously at the David Nolan Gallery and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York on January 28th, the art world proves itself sadly behind the curve. According to the exhibition press release, “the goal of this exhibition is to remove [the] prurient connotations, implicit even in works of art, ever since the pudendum was prudishly covered by a fig leaf.” There are dozens of vagina-outing artists in the show, ranging from Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picasso through Judy Chicago, John Currin, and Jeff Koons.

Hello? Don’t these curators know the fig leaf fell off a long time ago? Don’t they ever surf the Web? Don’t they know that practically every community theater in the country now puts...

It’s hardly news that the academy leans left, or that many conservatives believe liberal professors are biased against those who hold conservative political positions. Now there’s research offering new reasons for the liberal slant of professors: Liberals, and not conservatives, are the ones who want to become professors in the first place. Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, two sociologists who co-authored the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” use data taken from the General Social Survey of opinions and social behaviors to compare professors with the rest of Americans.

They conclude that jobs ranging from farmer and nurse to policeman and professor are typecast in different ways—according to gender, political leanings, etc. Because being a professor is one of those jobs...

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 -- to this day considered one of the most destructive earthquakes ever -- struck on a religious holiday. It flattened what had been a beautiful city, including almost every single church. Europeans -- especially the literati -- were shocked. How, if there was any kind of divinity at all, could so many innocents be slaughtered? The Enlightenment considered man’s ignorance to be the core reason for man’s misery, and reason to be the solution to man’s superstitious attachment to faith and the route to his progress. The Lisbon earthquake in particular -- and the uncalled-for suffering wrought by nature more generally -- made this idea appear deeply wrongheaded.

Voltaire’s Candide (1758) was written at least partially in response to the Lisbon earthquake, but it also tackled the great problem of human suffering in...

The appointment of 57-year-old Jeffrey Deitch, the well-known New York dealer in contemporary art, as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles marks the first time that the owner of commercial gallery has become the director of a major nonprofit art museum. No matter how thickly MoCA slathers the news with public-relations frosting, this is a conflict of interest. Not a “possible” conflict of interest, but an obvious conflict of interest. Can a man who’s made his living dealing contemporary art put all that behind him and now approach art as something to be valued for its own sake, and for a non-buying general public’s sake, and not something that’s for sale? Well, you tell me.

In terms of money, the appointment makes a sort of sense -- at least that’s how MoCA’s Board sees it. The museum has been in...

Two in one blow: Another quiz show scandal (remember the old one with Charles Van Doren back in the 1950s?) and another talent show narrowly averted.

“Our Little Genius,” a new Fox quiz show about child geniuses competing for huge amounts of money that was set to begin on Fox next week, has been put on the back burner -- or maybe even permanently cancelled -- because of “concerns about the integrity of the show.” The producer released a statement saying “he recently discovered that there was an issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during the preproduction of ‘Our Little Genius,’” and that “as a result, I am not comfortable delivering the episodes without reshooting them.”

Did someone give the little tykes...

My daughter is always on the lookout on behalf of her professor-mom for news stories about Hofstra. Today, I received an email from her about Hofstra that she found in today’s online version of the freebie daily people read on the subway, a.m.New York. In a special section entitled “Aim High,” the paper’s guide to choosing “the right college,” Hofstra is singled out on the cover with a huge headline that declares, “Hofstra: A Success Story in the NYC Area.” We learn about Hofstra’s ambition to raise its status from a fallback school to a first choice (it’s working) and its steady rise in the higher-ed hierarchy (a fact).

The PR people at Hofstra must be over the moon right now—or maybe even breaking out the champagne....