"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…

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From Wikipedia, a Théodore Chassériau portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, who may have known Americans better than we know ourselves.

Several commenters have asked Brainstorm bloggers to weigh in on the firing of Naomi Schaefer Riley. My conflicted opinion on the matter kept me silent for a while—perhaps no better than Hamlet’s dithering. In any event, with the dust now somewhat settled, I’d like to say something.

I found Ms. Riley’s two Brainstorm posts on Black Studies programs so sloppy, arrogant, repugnant and indefensible as arguments that they pushed to the very back burner the issue of free speech in general and, in particular, Ms. Riley’s rights or privileges as a Brainstorm blogger. All I could focus on was that Ms. Riley had violated the fundamental responsibility of any writer—…

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user muffinn)

Most working artists in America (certainly most who teach at colleges and universities) hold a Master of Fine Arts degree, established by the College Art Association, more than 50 years ago, as the terminal degree in the fine arts. As Dan Berrett writes in this week’s Chronicle, however, that may be about to change. The College Art Association is now tiptoeing around the idea of embracing the studio Ph.D. as the new terminal degree in the fine arts. Recently, the CAA hosted a workshop entitled, “Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?” The title tells you everything you need to know about how differently people in the art world view the idea.

On one side are those for whom a Ph.D. in studio art can’t come too soon. It would address the needs of internationally a…

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Picasso's "Ma Jolie." (Click to get to image's host site, MoMA.)

A couple of weeks ago, I lectured on Picasso and Cubism in a team-taught course for Hofstra Honors College freshmen in which I am one of 14 professors. The students in my two discussion groups also took a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso’s seminal Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and other Cubist works by him. For a short paper, I asked students to persuade an imaginary “Uncle Fred”—who’s hostile to modern art but nevertheless accompanies them to a modern art museum—that Picasso’s paintings are worthwhile art. I supplied “Uncle Fred’s” questions; the students wrote the responses.

With previous papers, I had my students make multiple revisions until they satisfied all my editorial comments—which started off…

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In this image made from video, blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng is seen on a video posted to YouTube Friday, April 27, 2012 by overseas Chinese news site Boxun.com. (Credit: AP Photo/Boxun.com). Click on image to get to CBS News story.

Like many Americans, I know very little about China. As a casual outside observer, however, I’ve picked up a few things that have molded my views—reading Pearl S. Buck as a young girl, studying a little Chinese history in college (including reading Mao’s Little Red Book—now there’s a charmer), devouring every last one of Qiu Xiaolong’s brutally fascinating, sardonically written Inspector Chen novels, and, of course, watching a slew of Chinese movies—including Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007). Add to this that I’ve…

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user eflon)

Merging commonsensical prose, sardonic wit and a broad knowledge of science, Natalie Angier writes smart, delightful essays about science. Like Brainstorm’s David Barash, she likes to connect the dots between animal and human behavior. In a recent column in The New York Times, “The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air,” Angier argues that when it comes to sisterly camaraderie, the young women on HBO’s new hit series Girls behave, in essentials, exactly like female elephants, chimps, baboons, and monkeys.

Angier points to a number of scientific studies demonstrating that girlfriends are hardly unique to Homo sapiens. Adult females in many other parts of the animal kingdom bond together in tight social units where they help out one another, hang out…

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Right now, a few blocks north of where I live, the New York City police and members of the FBI are methodically digging up the basement of a Soho building, hoping to find the remains of Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy who disappeared 33 years ago while walking the two blocks from his home to his school bus stop. It’s odd to think that if Etan hadn’t disappeared, he’d now be a middle-aged man.

The disappearance of this little boy precipitated the missing children’s movement. Etan’s was the first child’s face to appear on the side of a milk carton; President Reagan declared May 25 (the day he went missing) “Missing Children Day”; and as a result of his disappearance, various pieces of legislation and methods for finding missing children were put into place.

The wheels of justice are notoriously slow—small consolation for such bitter cold-case crimes as that of Etan…

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Photo by Flickr/CC user LauraLewis23, who writes: "This photograph comes from my AS exam unit in photography. It looks at the way things people say or specific words can stick with you and mentally impact you in the long term. I look at how a word as simple as ‘fat’ can stick with somebody and provoke a hatred for themselves."

I see we’re heading into another angst-fest over how fat Americans have become. It was about a year ago that I blogged on the breaking news that America was first in the world in terms of fatness. Today I read that starting next month, HBO will be showing a four-part documentary called The Weight of the Nation. A book with this title is forthcoming as well. We’re back with fat.

All the studies on American obesity give us the same droningly depressing numbers: Two out of …

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(Photo by Flickr/CC user Peter Baker)

There are times when the valiant efforts of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem all seem to have been for naught. When “Democratic strategist” Hilary Rosen (who’s associated with no one’s campaign) remarked on CNN that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life,” she set off a storm of indignant responses. Everyone fell all over themselves to affirm that stay-at-home mothers know what it is to work. A chastened Hilary Rosen walked back her remarks and apologized to Ann Romney.

Now that the ruffled feathers have settled back down, can we calmly agree that yes, stay-at-home mothers work, but no, most American mothers are not at all like Ann Romney—or, while we’re at it, Michelle Obama?  “Working mothers” is a category that…

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You want beauty? Then you want Rita, not elementary school girls in minis. Please.

On Saturday, a friend who lives in upstate New York invited me to come along with her to an annual “county pageant” at a local resort hotel. As soon as I arrived, I saw that even though the word “beauty” wasn’t anywhere in sight—neither on the banner, nor on any of the brochures—the county pageant quacked a lot like the duck commonly called a “beauty pageant.”

The pageant I attended was in an enormous, dimly lit, multitiered auditorium whose walls were covered with red velvet. Here and there, on a few lonely sconces, I caught the sparkle of fake gold. Overhead spotlights lighted a wide, shallow proscenium. Some sort of unidentifiable (at least to me) teen music filled the room. (Later it would almost drown out the…

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"Head of a Bull," 1942, Musée Picasso, Paris

Yesterday, as one of 14 professors teaching in a Hofstra team-taught Honors College course with over 200 first-year students, I delivered a lecture on Picasso. Easy, right? An artist who teaches and writes about art lecturing on Picasso? No, not right. Hard. This lecture had me holed up in a corner for two weeks. The stack of Picasso books next to my laptop grew tall, and I spent hours poring over images of Picasso’s work on such web sites as ArtStor, MoMA, the Musée National in Paris, and Olga’s Gallery. It took me forever to grind out an outline, an introduction, and finally the body of the lecture itself. At one point, my husband said to me, “Enough already. This is the most over-prepared lecture in the history of academe.”

Like most serious…

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A lot of artists I know considered the art critic Hilton Kramer, who died today at the age of 84, too reactionary to be taken seriously. Kramer, who was chief art critic at The New York Times from 1976-1982, was also the founding editor of The New Criterion (which he started with the late Samuel Lipman). In addition, he was the art critic for the New York Observer (from 1987 to 2006), along with the New York Post (from 1993-1997). He was a major conservative player in the culture wars, attacking the NEA and repeatedly hammering home in his writings and lectures that irony had destroyed sincerity, and “institutionalized subversion” had become the new academic norm. He saw postmodernism as history gone awry, and modernism as the pinnacle of originality, honesty and truthfulness.

Known for his ferocious, pitbullian attacks not only against art exhibitions he didn’t like, but…

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[CAUTION: The contents of this post may be offensive to conservatives.]

Today the Supreme Court begins hearing arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act—a formal piece of legislation that, from the start, Republicans have disparagingly referred to as “Obamacare.” It will be a sorry day if the Court strikes down the legislation.

Should the legislation stand, Republicans may rue the day they decided to cleverly malign this bold piece of legislation. They should keep in mind the American purchase of the territory of Alaska from Russia in 1867, pushed forward by the Secretary of State at the time, William Seward. Do they know that many Republicans initially opposed this purchase by referring to it as “Seward’s Folly”?

I am a big fan of Obamacare. Sure, it was a compromise, and like many liberals and progressives, having wanted a single payer …

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That women are more vain than men seems obvious, at first glance. Take the vast amount of retail space and the enormous sums of money devoted to the shopping and primping needs of women, compared to those of men. Think about all the women who, daily, paint their faces before they go out in public. Or consider how many women happily drop a couple of hundred bucks on a new hair color, or willingly hobble around in a painful pair of super-high, spiked-heeled shoes, just for the sake of appearance. (Only women categorize part of their footwear inventory as “walking shoes.” )

Vanity, of course, is self-love. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau identified two kinds of self-love—one a healthy sort of self-interestedness, which he thought living in society destroyed, the other the vanity that comes about from living in society—a self-consciousness that renders us constantly aware of…

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Expulsion of Adam and Even from Paradise, Brancacci Chapel, Florence, Italy

One of the overarching narratives of Western culture is the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. Although religious leaders and scholars revere the tale, it remains for women, a curse. Some people try to put a positive spin on the story of how Eve got herself and Adam expelled from the Garden of Eden by comparing her with Prometheus, in his longing for power. Yet it’s awfully hard not to see Eve as worse than Adam. She was the one who listened to the serpent in the first place; she was the first to disobey God’s command not to eat fruit from either of the two trees in the middle of the garden. Most important, Eve tempted Adam into being disobedient with her.

Among the most profoundly moving paintings in…

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While I’ve been mucking around in the trenches writing about battles over birth control, insurance coverage and the poesy of Rush Limbaugh, David Barash has been having a jolly good time of it going on—for six fascinating posts—about the female orgasm. All this talk about sex and sexual selection is prompting me to ask all sorts of questions about sex and women I haven’t thought about in a long time. Rather than let David be the only one to have fun, I’ll sit myself down at the sex roundtable, and offer a few comments about sex rooted not in science, but in more ordinary, commonsensical observations.

I’ve never forgotten Lord Chesterfield’s droll remark that when it comes to sex, the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. Granted, the happily humping grizzlies on the video link David provided presumably got their sex for free, but…

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Rush Limbaugh must be having one hell of a jolly time what with all the attention he’s garnered by calling Sandra Fluke—the young Georgetown University law student who spoke out publicly in favor of women having access to contraception through school or employment insurance plans (something currently denied them at places such as Georgetown)—a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

Concentrate for a moment on what Mr. Limbaugh revealed about himself when he also said:

[I]f we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

Excuse me? “So we can all watch?” Is Mr. Limbaugh planning a party? Sounds to this observer as if Mr. Limbaugh is experienced in watching online video postings of a certain sort. Wonder if he’d be willing to talk about this on his show….

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Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman

A calm sense of freedom overtakes mature artists—artists over the hump of their budding years. When I was a young artist trying to find my footing, I floated around in the art world the way a whale sucks in plankton while it moves through the ocean. I went to see as many art exhibitions as possible. Now, however, I’m extremely picky about what I choose to go see.

Maybe it’s as simple as what time does to us as we grow older. Suddenly we see it transformed into a kind of palpable substance. Stupid as it sounds to write this, time to “mature” human…

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Talk about the vagina was all the rage this past week in the Republican-controlled Virginia legislature. With the backing of their Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, Virginia lawmakers put forth a bill requiring women seeking an abortion, even in the earliest stages of a pregnancy, first undergo an ultrasound. To all but those who enjoy sophistry, the intent of the backers of the bill was clearly to set up obstacles for women seeking what are, under current law, perfectly legal abortions.

Yet it seems that very few of the Republicans backing the original ultrasound bill knew what goes on in a gynecologist’s office, and what, exactly, an early ultrasound in a pregnancy entails.

Slowly, as people realized what, exactly, an early ultrasound (i.e., transvaginal ultrasound) entails, legislators and the governor balked. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made sport of the whole lot of the…

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Early yesterday, I had the privilege of interviewing High Priest Freddy Graham, brother of the Reverend Franklin Graham, ostracized son of the Reverend Billy Graham, and CEO of the Priest Freddy Graham Pagan Association. (To watch our interview in video format, go here.)

Priest Freddy started the interview off with the bold claim that he suspected President Obama might not be a true Pagan. “We Pagans are pretty darn good at sussing out whether people are true Pagans or not,” he told me, adding, “Mr. Obama has said he’s a Pagan, so I just have to assume that he is. All I know is, I’m a pretty good goat-entrails reader, and the gods have been darn clear in telling me that Mr. Obama’s faith is questionable. I can’t really tell if he’s one of us or not. I mean, you have to ask every person, and I’m just not willing to say for sure that President Obama is indeed of the Pagan …

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