We get things in our head, a sort
of wonder I suppose, a notion,
about where to stand on the hill to see
the white blur of a steeple eight
or maybe ten miles away
at the center of a country town
whose school has been consolidated,
and the little country store, where news
and gossip spread around and maybe
a local discovery was claimed
by one of the loafers there, is closed.
Going to find that spot on the hill
in order to see from a certain prospect
a world far enough away it seems
a symbol is a walk that brings
an important silence down on us.
You could say, I guess, it makes us think—
just walking up a hill to find
a part in the distance that looks familiar.
It makes me think that walking in silence
and going up to where the woods
have made an agreement to leave
an opening—that walk has become
a plain responsibility.
Yet it seems to be a kind of…
I’m afraid to fly. I do it all the time, but it’s one of the hardest things I do. The only reason I get onto planes is because it’s just bad karma for me to get up in front of hundreds of students every year and tell them to face their fears and see their worries as challenges and then say “But as for me, I’m taking the bus.”
So I fly with my friend, Dr. Smirnoff, and I go where I need to be. But I have never exactly “relaxed” when approaching an airport.
Trains, however, usually relax me. Often when planning my trip to N.Y.C. from Hartford on Amtrak, I permit myself the luxury of indulgence. I bring my headphones, an actual fun book, and a sandwich from home to eat during the three-hour journey. I can take a nap, lose myself in a novel, and not worry about turbulence up ahead.
True, if it some terrible weather happens–such as drizzle–the trains could be delayed for hours….
Maybe it’s the start of the holiday weekend, that I just submitted my grades, that I just got a new grill, but I have been thinking a lot about eating and eating meat in particular. Which is why I so didn’t need to read this story (warning: stop now if you are hoping to eat a hot dog this weekend. No really, stop!).
Mao Sugiyama, a self-described “asexual” from Tokyo, cooked up, seasoned and served his own genitalia to five diners at a swanky banquet in Japan last month.
Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley.
The sociological imagination fails me. There is nothing to do but turn to my more anthropological guideposts. The first and most obvious thing to say, a la Levi-Strauss, is that…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, than one with dutifully data-derived dancing dots doubtless deserves double. So, it is with gratitude to the Department of Commerce and its subordinate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (dupes of the commie climate-change conspiracy, all of them), that I alert y’all to the following Web site, which provides an intriguing, readily understood picture of global carbon-dioxide levels based on sampling stations around the world, as well as going back in prehistoric, pre-human time. It’s even fun to watch. Just click here, and then be patient; it takes a few seconds to load and a few minutes to watch, but repays the investment. In case you missed it, CLICK HERE.
Over at The New Republic, I discuss how the K-12 part of Mitt Romney’s recently-released education plan is highly focused on markets and student choice. The higher-education side is, too, where it’s arguably more appropriate. College students are adults (although many just barely) who, in theory, can choose among a vast array of institutions. Romney is right to say:
“Students and their families must also be given the information they need to intelligently weigh the costs and benefits of the many options available to them. Better information about products and services helps consumers make more-informed choices, and nowhere is this as important as when students consider a postsecondary education. Despite requirements that colleges and universities report volumes of data to the U.S. Department of Education, there is no simple way for students to access that data and interpret its…
The only thing worse than not having money is wanting it.
At least that seems to be the case in certain circles. What we all needed, evidently, were greedy ancestors who could die and leave us without the taint of desire.
You’ll be called greedy if you work and save obsessively to buy a big house and fill it with antiques, but if you’ve inherited that big house and the antiques are simply identified as Grampy’s set of first editions or Mumsy’s matched Degas, then it’s OK, and you’re not greedy.
You’re aristocratic.
If you long for the stuff, having been denied it at an early age, however, then you’re lost to avarice. You’re petty bourge, baby. Those better bred than you will tsk-tsk.
We spend a lot of time judging what other people “need.”
If David Barash’s series on the female orgasm showed anything, it is that when it comes to evolution it is human beings on people’s agendas. It always was this way. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an 18th-century evolutionist and he made it clear that it is Homo sapiens that counts.
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!
In the Origin, Darwin said little about humans, but at the end there is no doubt who is a big (albeit unspoken) theme in the book, and in the Descent of Man published some 12 years later, we have a starring role. And coming do…
A few months back in the opening essay of First Things (Aug/Sept 2011), editor R.R. Reno opened with an assertion that would strike most academics as backwards. “But as a culture,” he stated, “liberalism has become insular and narrow-minded. It lacks the capacity for the generous appreciation of other points of view needed in a pluralistic society. That capacity is more likely to be found today among conservatives, particularly religious conservatives.”
To the liberal intelligentsia, of course, Reno should transpose his terms. Conservatives are open-minded and liberals aren’t? C’mon. This is to reverse one of liberalism’s central claims, indeed, one of the things that sharply distinguishes a liberal from a conservative (and ennobles the former). Liberalism is all about receptive minds and inclusive societies. Conservativism is about restriction and denial. …
"Yeah, but you can still sign a check with your other hand, can't ya, buddy?" (Photo by Parker Michael Knight via Flickr/CC)
Next week, Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, will chair a field hearing on the effectiveness of federal laws to protect patients’ access to care and privacy. The hearing comes on the heels of Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson‘s accusing Accretive Health–one of the nation’s largest debt-collection agencies–of excessive and possibly illegal tactics, including strong-arming patients in Minnesota hospitals. A voluminous six part report can be found here. However, the issue extends beyond Minnesota as Accretive has contracts with hospital systems throughout the nation.
According to the attorney general’s report, the Illinois-based collection agency hid in…
" . . . and your pension and benefits too . . . " (photo by Flickr/CC user outcast104)
Just a few short years ago, vampires ruled. Twilight, True Blood, and other cultural obsessions posited the vampire as perfection–a strong predator who is not merely beautiful, but never ages. Joan Rivers with a mixed martial arts fighter’s body.
But perhaps it is a sign of our times that these ubervampires have morphed into the far more campy ones in Dark Shadows. As Americans lost our appetite for the sort of blood-sucking predators who ruled Hollywood and Wall Street, vampires no longer haunted our cultural imaginary as heroes, but as villains. By the time Matt Taibbi used the phrase “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sacks in 2009, the vampire had lost his mojo.
In June, I will be returning to Washington for the annual Pharmed Out conference, a project located at Georgetown University Medical Center. It is one of my favorite events of the year, in part because of the wide array of academics, journalists, and activists who attend, but mainly because of its extraordinarily committed, outspoken director, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, and her merry band of student volunteers. Adriane agreed to an interview by email. Part 1 appears below. I will post Part 2 next week.
Would it be fair to say that your project was funded by a felony?
Yes, we were funded by the Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Grant program, a novel and never-to-be-repeated program that resulted from a settlement between Pfizer and all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We promised so much that before we got the grant, the grant administrators asked us to cut do…
"What the ... A third essay question--on Erasmus and Renaissance portraiture! Save us! Save us!" (Photo by Patrick Denker via Flickr/CC)
On the last day of class, before finals began, a student asked me if it was possible to rewrite one of the essays for a course that had included three essays, a midterm, a final examination, and seminar discussions. “I need an ‘A’ for my scholarship,” the student announced. Although my brain quickly ticked off the ways I loathe this sort of appeal, I smiled, answered no, and suggested the student study hard for the final exam.
After submitting my final grades for the semester (I experienced a flicker of hesitation before I entered the above student’s final grade, which was not a grade of “A”), I began thinking about the underlying injustice–and…
Trident II missile, just fired from nuclear submarine (Wikipedia)
There’s a noteworthy trend among retired military and civilian officials who, in their professional capacity, held senior roles with regard to our nuclear weaponry: When they retire, they often see the error of their ways, denounce what they have done and apologize for how they “succeeded” in their careers. Here is Prospero, in the fifth act of The Tempest:
…But this rough magic
I here abjure…I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than ever did plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Unlike Prospero, however, these people cannot break their magic staff and drown their book – i.e., undo the harm they have done; moreover, unlike Prospero, they are real. For example, former Defense Secretary…
As I mentioned in my last post on improving our comments policy, I had my say about Naomi Schaefer Riley’s work roughly a year ago (Giggling at Stereotypes). Over time I think most reasonable observers will agree that the issue with her work isn’t one flawed post, but a history of offenses against academic norms.
Together with shameless hit pieces like The Faculty Lounges, her assault on African-American Studies was not an exception, but a repetition, of serious blunders against both academic and journalistic values. I wouldn’t have hired her, and I’d have intervened in her efforts earlier. Her work was ideological first and foremost. As others have observed, the question isn’t why she was fired; it’s why she was hired.
Many of us in higher education get to our ideologies as a result of our research: we think “reality is broken” in some way, to use Jane McGonigal’s phrase, and we…
Christian is my computer Godfather: he’s in total control of the whole system–the computer at home, the laptop, the computers at work, and my husband’s computer as well. If you met Christian, you’d understand why we trust him with our technology (and therefore a big part of our writing lives): His quick intelligence is as obvious as it is reassuring.
This is a mensch; this is young man who can fix and do everything. He has a big-time full-time job, goes to law school at night, and works this electronic and computer enterprise as a side business.
But if you saw him right now, on this beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon as he sits in front of the Mac on my desk when he and his lovely wife Jennifer–they are both former students–wish he would just come home already, you would…
I never saw or heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in person, but he–along with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – has been part of my life since I was a teenager. First on LP’s, then on tape, and more recently on CDs. He was born too young to be a real part of the Nazi shame; she unfortunately was seriously compromised. But as interpreters and performers of German vocal music, they were and are beyond compare. Above all the lieder and above all lieder the lieder of Schubert. I write with tears in my eyes as I listen once more to Der Winterabend and to Die Forelle and Der Erlkönig.
I do not believe in God or Heaven. It does not matter. We humans–we humans stained so deeply by original sin–have won. We have created such transcendent beauty that future promises are worthless. Why wait for eternity when this life of ours is touched with such greatness? I am truly grateful to these two great…
I have no idea whether the three young men in Chicago charged with terrorism-related felonies are guilty as charged. Prosecutors say they are “members” of “the ‘Black Bloc’ group,” which is not so much a group that has members as a shifting population of enragés who take advantage of large demonstrations which they haven’t organized to break things. These are, in general, careless people, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Such people exist.
It’s possible that the three being held in Chicago on $1.5 million bond apiece really really intended to throw Molotov cocktails at police stations, police cars, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house and Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, and…
For the first time ever in the history of this column, I am going to gloat. Yesterday was the Program for Jewish Civilization‘s sixth annual presentation of senior theses and the work our students did made me truly proud. I mean, proud in the way that one sighs, “Oh, this is why I became a professor. ‘Cuz I was sort of forgetting there. But now it’s OK. Now I remember.”
This is the set up: The seniors spend the better part of the year researching and writing a thirty-page thesis on anything relating to Judaism that interests them (in consultation, of course, with our faculty). They are paired up with a faculty adviser with expertise in their chosen area.
They meet their advisers privately a minimum of four times during the semester. Then they meet an additional four times with the director of the senior colloquium, Rev. Dennis McManus, D.Phil., to discuss, refine and criticize …
I’m writing to you not as a member of Brainstorm, but as a one of the many poltroonish souls seduced into clicking onto the piece titled “What Professors Make.” We are legion; even though we might not have the guts to go find out what our individual colleagues are actually pulling in, despite the fact that at public institutions–such as UConn, where I teach–the information is readily available.
Anyways, everyone knows what professors make. Professors make trouble!
(Get it?)
But seriously folks . . .
I knew all too well what I was in for: I knew I would be reading an article that would make me want to compare myself to all the Professor Joneses of this world to see whether I was keeping up.
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
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