July 23, 2012, 3:07 pm
By Laurie Fendrich
Photo by Tanaka at New York Daily News site, from a 2009 article
Together with his wife Dorothy, Herbert Vogel, who died Sunday at the age of 89, spent about half a century accumulating an enormous collection of edgy contemporary art. In 1991, the couple gave almost their whole collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2008, they divvied up what remained of it among fifty museums in fifty states.
More striking than the couple’s generosity and sense of giving back to society is that unlike most contemporary art collectors, the Vogels were not wealthy. Herbert Vogel was a high-school dropout who earned his living as a postal worker, sorting mail during night shifts at various New York post offices. His wife worked as a reference librarian at a Brooklyn library. Even after they retired, this middle-class …
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July 22, 2012, 12:20 pm
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Politico reported on July 17 that campaign officials deny that there will be any repeat this year of Rick Warren’s 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. It is not clear from the report whether these officials hale from the Romney or Obama camps (or both).
It’s the only news item of its kind that I have seen, so I am a bit confused (see my subsequent post of July 19 on the matter). Most news agencies are still reporting that the event is on the books. If–and at present it’s a big if–Warren’s hope for a 2012 reprise is currently off the table we must ask: Why?
Warren’s exceptionally dimwitted tweet about the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado (Hint: the teaching of evolution is to blame for the massacre) came after the Politico report and can’t be seen as a factor. So did Professor Berlinerblau’s column/intervention in which he called attention to the pastor’s amateurish…
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July 22, 2012, 12:14 pm
By Laurie Essig
Over at The Baffler, Steve Almond writes that those of us who think The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are comedic genius are just not smart enough to understand that they’re not that funny. According to Almond, the fact that so many of us revere Stewart and Colbert is
not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues. Over the past decade, political humor has proliferated not as a daring form of social commentary, but a reliable profit source. Our high-tech jesters serve as smirking adjuncts to the dysfunctional institutions of modern media and politics, from which all their routines derive. Their net effect is almost entirely therapeutic: they congratulate viewers for their fine habits of thought and feeling while remaining careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too…
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July 21, 2012, 2:30 pm
By Gina Barreca
A conversation on Friday morning about the killings in Colorado by, allegedly, a 24-year-old “former honors student” went something like this:
Friend: “The shooter was a medical student? Don’t they still test for ability to handle stress? What happened to the rigorous standard for the mental health of those entering medical programs?”
G: “For this kid to get into medical school, he had to have recommendation letters saying he could work as part of a team. To find out who wrote those letters would be interesting. How would you feel if you said ‘This is one great kid who’ll be a boon to humanity and save lives?’”
Friend. “In the first year of medical school, this guy would have been surrounded by people driving him crazy but he wouldn’t have had time to go plan a highly-structured massacre. My nephew is in medical school now. He says doesn’t have time to shower.”
G: “You’re…
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July 21, 2012, 7:52 am
By David Barash
Dawn in Puerto Encantado, Venezuela. Sex, anyone?
A little while ago, I worried that the next time someone asked me about the book, Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, I might vomit. An over-reaction? Perhaps. And one likely composed, in part, of simple envy, since their book seems to have sold a lot of copies. At least as contributory, however, is the profoundly annoying fact that Sex at Dawn has been taken as scientifically valid by large numbers of naïve readers … whereas it is an intellectually myopic, ideologically driven, pseudo-scientific fraud.
Written by people who don’t know diddly-squat about evolutionary biology, and—worse yet—who don’t know how much they don’t know, Sex at Dawn purports to demonstrate that human beings are “naturally” polyamorous, that…
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July 20, 2012, 3:06 pm
By Michele Goodwin
Last week, Judge Louis Freeh, a former director of the FBI, released a copiously detailed, lengthy report about Penn State’s role in Gerald Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys on campus. The report notes that there was a “total disregard” for the young boys who were the sexually abused victims of Gerald Sandusky—the former coach. According to Freeh, the most senior members of the university’s governing structure, “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.”
Indeed, to those closely following the investigation, indictment, and trial of Sandusky, the report provided important details, but was no surprise. Last year, when I first blogged about this issue, I wrote, “More curious is the statement released by Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, who claims the perjury charges against [Tim] Curley and [Gary] Schultz are …
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July 20, 2012, 1:25 pm
By Michael Ruse
Over on his blog, Why Evolution is True, the eminent Chicago evolutionist Jerry Coyne has taken on the role of my doppelgänger, since we agree 90 percent of the time and then 10 percent of the time find ourselves in completely different positions. Although perhaps I am his doppelgänger and exist only as a function of his imagination or psychic aura.
Putting such fascinating Germanic speculations aside, a couple of days ago Coyne raised a point about the science-religion relationship that has long troubled me and that he thinks – and I agree entirely – is not dealt with adequately by those who want to promote harmony between science and religion, the dreaded (or pitiful) “accommodationists,” a label that Jerry Coyne bestows with scorn and that I wear with pride.
The problem is this. If Christianity is true, then the existence of humans cannot be a contingent matter….
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July 19, 2012, 10:29 am
By Carl Elliott
Near Dunedin, New Zealand
Another spectacular winter morning in Dunedin, New Zealand. Clear blue sky, frost on the ground, lush green hills plunging into the South Pacific. It is hard to complain about the setting, still less about the kindness and decency of the inhabitants. It has been nearly 22 years since my wife and I first landed in Dunedin, in August of 1990, when I began a postdoctoral fellowship at the newly established Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago. I still wonder why we ever left.
It was an extraordinary time for bioethics in New Zealand. In 1990, the country was still reeling from the shock of a medical research scandal – the “unfortunate experiment” at the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland. In that study, which had begun in 1966 and continued for a…
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July 19, 2012, 12:59 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Fox News is reporting that Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren is planning a reprise of his 2008 Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. I would urge those in both the Obama and Romney camps to skip this event. I truly hope that a 2012 get-together does not come to pass.
I say this not only because the idea of a sectarian cleric religious-testing American presidential candidates is deeply problematic on Church/State grounds. (Will rabbis, Roman Catholic priests, imams and atheist chaplains be granted the same access and interviewing privileges?)
I would also avoid the shindig because the previous forum that Warren hosted was a disaster by standards of fair journalistic practice.
Let me take you back four years to Saturday August 16th, 2008. Pastor Warren opened his event with words that have intrigued me ever since:
We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not …
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July 18, 2012, 1:03 pm
By Todd Gitlin
For years, I’ve opposed calls for academic boycotts of Israel. (Here’s one sample and here’s another.) I won’t rehearse all the arguments here. Suffice to say that the life of the mind in universities is irreducibly precious for a deeply challenged civilization that is in so many ways hostile to intellectual life. For all the challenges that universities impose for free thought, all on their own, any decision to restrict academic contacts on any political ground is a case of cutting off a lobe of the brain to spite the face. In a world where many nations impose onerous political conditions on intellectual autonomy, choosing one particular nation’s universities for special opprobrium—especially when discussion in precisely those universities is rambunctious and unimpeded—is flatly wrong.
The State of Israel has just (again) kicked the Palestinians in the head, and demonstrated …
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July 18, 2012, 10:43 am
By David Barash
Isaac Newton, painted by Godfrey Kneller. The late Sir Isaac wasn't shy about making use of a prior "scientific consensus."
Responding to a recent post by our own Mark Bauerlein, a commenter (flailing—and failing—to find justification for her disavowal of the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming) noted that she was “trying [unsuccessfully, one gathers] to think of a concept that is more ‘anti-science’ than consensus.” I find this observation to be uncharacteristically thought-provoking on her part, although in this case she is—characteristically—wrong-headed and downright uninformed. I fear, however, that she is not alone.
It may be that some people, lacking any real concept of science, are indeed under the impression that consensus is somehow inimical to the scientific …
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July 18, 2012, 8:00 am
By Guest Blogger
(Photo by Paul Hart via Flickr/CC)
By Lisa Russ Spaar
Is there a subject more often evoked in poetry than our earth’s own natural satellite? The earliest poems in a host of languages—Greek, Chinese, Tamil, Hebrew, Arabic, to name but a few—include lunar references, images, tropes, confessions, curses, and appeals.
Scientists think the cratered mass of cosmic debris includes earth matter sent into orbit along with other planetary stuff in a seminal terrestrial collision. Cycling around our globe, it has been mythologized, romanticized, blamed, worshiped, and charged with symbolism, not only in writings about the moon but also in copious writing about writing about the moon. As poet Paul Legault puts it in a feature on moon poetry posted at the Academy of American Poets Web site…
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July 17, 2012, 1:45 pm
By Mark Bauerlein
Let's get oriented, shall we? (Photo by Dru Bloomfield via Flickr/CC)
Russell Jacoby’s article on conservative anti-intellectualism in this week’s Chronicle Review opens with a fair appraisal.
“Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history.”
For conservatives who are tired of hearing liberals and leftists rehearse the “conservatives-are-stupid” charge, it’s a welcome concession. But as Jacoby’s next sentences signal–”The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular”—the essay shifts…
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July 16, 2012, 8:12 pm
By Michael Ruse
Like everyone else, as the sordid Penn State story becomes more and more detailed, I have been more and more depressed and appalled. How could these men have so completely turned their backs on the gross mistreatment of young children? How could people in authority, people who made so much of their personal integrity, have so disregarded the most basic rules of morality? How could Joe Paterno of all people done what he did, for it seems now that there were sins of commission, active covering up, as well as sins of omission, not doing what one should do?
The answer of course in large part is simply because these people — in order to protect themselves and the system of which they were part — deliberately, of their own free will, did what is wrong. No amount of excusing or justifying or anything else can blind us to this fact. These people, with great powers and responsibilities,…
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July 16, 2012, 4:58 pm
By Laurie Fendrich
The Madonna and Child, Duccio di Guoninsegna, c. 1300, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In my last post, I blogged on a column David Brooks wrote last week on the rising inequality of opportunity between rich and poor children in America. Now comes a long New York Times article identifying single motherhood as a key factor in that increasing inequality. In the Times article, Jason DeParle (who in his separate blog includes statistics purporting to show the link between rising economic inequality and single motherhood) tracks the paths of two mothers who started out more or less the same—both young middle class women who went to college—but ended up leading very different lives.
One of the women finished college, got married and then had children, and remains married. Result: Two incomes, stable…
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July 16, 2012, 1:49 pm
By Gina Barreca
(photo by Drew Coffman via Flickr/CC)
1. Only you can figure out how to manage your personal and emotional life; as advisers we can listen, challenge comfort, and offer guidance. The guidance we can offer most effectively is of the professional sort.
You must handle your domestic conflicts in the appropriate arena while keeping a check on how they affect your productivity. Please don’t ask us to assist you with anything apart from your work too often, too regularly, or with too much of an emphasis on the thought that we are somehow responsible for getting you into this in the first place (we didn’t get you “with doctorate” the way some fly-by-night lover might get a woman “with child”).
It’s imperative that you learn to find out what works for you and this is the time to learn it. This is the…
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July 15, 2012, 10:19 am
By Laurie Essig
In a post on Disney’s wedding industrial and ideological complex over at Bitch, Michael Braithwaite writes about weddings and how to make them good. For instance, Braithwaite writes that weddings with themes are good since
Themes are an excellent way to incorporate some imagination and a little wonder into adult life, which is maybe why theme weddings have become a bit of “thing” in the last couple of decades, with people getting married on the ocean floor, while rock climbing, etc. I’ve had friends whose weddings followed the theme of their first date, or a particularly meaningful trip taken together. It’s fun! But, more importantly, theme weddings are a great way to reflect something special about the couple—to aesthetically, visually, and atmospherically reinforce what makes a relationship unique. To clarify: Theme weddings are different from package weddings, which are like…
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July 13, 2012, 4:37 pm
By David Barash
A discoverer dude, not a creator god (Wikipedia)
Early in my teaching career—sometime in the mid Paleozoic—I employed short essay exams in my undergraduate animal behavior class at the University of Washington. (Now that the enrollment has metastasized from 24 to 300, I’ve regretfully turned to computer-graded multiple choice questions.) One of those now-extinct short essays asked students to explain, briefly, Darwin’s primary scientific contribution. I still remember one student’s answer: “He invented evolution.”
Sorry, no cigar … and no credit. (The correct answer, btw, isn’t even that Darwin discovered evolution or that he presented abundant evidence in its favor; rather, he came up with the most plausible explanation for the mechanism whereby evolution proceeds: namely, natural…
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July 13, 2012, 3:45 pm
By Kevin Carey
There are two quotes from the Penn State scandal that I can’t get out of my mind. This:
In a confidential note, [former senior vice president for finance and business Gary C.] Schultz wrote, “Behavior—at best inappropriate @ worst sexual improprieties.” He also noted, “Is this the opening of Pandora’s box?” and “Other children?”
And:
“This approach [of failing to alert authorities] is acceptable to me,” [Penn State President] Spanier wrote in an e-mail to Mr. Schultz and [Athletic Director] Curley. “The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.”But that can be assessed down the road,” he continued. “The approach you outline is humane and a reasonable way to proceed.”
Is there some possible context that could put these words in a different light? Because these are the thoughts of moral monsters….
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July 13, 2012, 11:47 am
By Todd Gitlin
(Photo by Austen Hufford via Flickr/CC)
The subject on which Bill Clinton kept secrets and lied was sex. The subject on which Mitt Romney keeps secrets and lies is money.
There is, first of all, the matter of Romney withholding all his past tax returns but one. Then, in recent days, there is the matter of the degree of responsibility he did or didn’t hold for actions by Bain Capital, which he headed (a fair characterization of a man who was simultaneously Chairman, CEO, and President), between February 1999 and March 2002, when he declared his candidacy for the governorship of Massachusetts. As of this morning, he’s still begging questions from the Boston Globe, including this:
The firm did not respond to Globe questions about why SEC filings show Romney in control of five Bain Capital business…
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