Another working road trip. My colleague needs a piece of equipment from the Apple store, which is in a mall. The Apple store is swarming with people, but in less than 30 seconds, a salesman comes alongside to take us to what we need. In the Apple store, if you have their app on your …
Whenever I have a lot to do, and I finally muster the resolve to do it, I’ll say “time to get down to it.” This always reminds me of that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song, which makes me think of Kent State, which reminds me of the time I interviewed for a political science …
“When the law is against you,” goes the adage, “argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. When both the facts and law are against you….” Here we may turn for instruction to Jerry Taylor, ringleader of Cato Institute officials in the unenviable position of needing to convince people who embrace …
There are many plausible explanations for why men commit nearly all murders and start most wars. It could be that we’re just hard-wired to smash skulls. Or perhaps it’s that we’ve learned how much chicks dig a man in uniform. Or maybe, according to Jesse Prinz, philosophy professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, it’s because …
“Voting is a universal right.” This wisdom from Victor Sanchez, president of the United States Student Association, explaining his efforts to get more college students to vote. Mr. Sanchez is himself a recent college graduate, and a fine illustration of why marching columns of students to the polls is not inherently virtuous. A vote cast …
In his recent Boston Review essay, philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel manages the neat trick of advocating a sensible position — that high-school students should be taught philosophy — so ineptly that he ends up proving the opposite, namely, that while it may be the case that students should learn philosophy, this is quite independent from …
It used to be required, of an intellectual seeking to hold forth on an idea, that he define his terms. Words are slippery things, after all. But then so are intellectuals, and perhaps this is why they often play faster and looser with terms than a backwoods car salesman. Corey Robin doesn’t have a car …
This is the time when we resolve to do things differently. I’ve certainly resolved to do a number of things differently, but most of these are neither here nor there to most of you, and probably little different from your own resolutions about Bible-reading and body fat and general niceness towards one’s fellow man, no …
In the closing hours the advertisements are redoubled; we see the candidates peddling their functional families, juxtaposed with a grim gallery of closed factories and soup lines and dead children, for which the fresh-faced candidates’ grainy-faced opponents are responsible, either in the past or the future or both. We are urged to vote, because this …
The AP headline is certainly startling: “41% OF NON-CHRISTIAN AF CADETS CITE PROSELYTIZING” My goodness, the reader is invited to think. What’s going on in Colorado Springs? Are little bands of dogmatists policing the halls like a pro-Jesus Taliban, seeking out bearers of Christopher Hitchens books and wearers of Linkin Park t-shirts to press against …
The problem with political science professor Corey Robin’s claim that warmongering is woven into the DNA of conservatives is that he can’t seem to define his subject. One minute a conservative is a Burkean, the next he’s a tea-partier, then a neocon, then a Republican politico. Richer still, Robin represents these British-American country-clubbing anti-marxist quasi-literate …
It just never gets old, the article by an academic detailing all the work that academics have to do. Rob Faunce offers the latest installment: We have to plan for our courses weeks in advance. We have papers to grade. Students to counsel. Department meetings to attend. One thing I’ve learned, in my stints across …
Here’s a shocking bit of news: rather than go with calls for coaches to have their performance evaluations tied to the graduation rate of their players, the NCAA has opted for a metric that sounds valuable, but instead simply measures how good a school is at making sure its players stay eligible to play. Which …
I’m always leery of research by people who desperately, desperately want a certain answer. So when I hear shouts of joy over a new study running counter to previous studies in its conclusion that putting small children in daycare has no adverse effects, I develop a more skeptical eye than usual. Which I know is …
Perhaps it’s a new phenomenon, or perhaps I’m becoming more curmudgeonly, but it’s gotten that I cannot abide watching the aftermath of NCAA basketball games. It’s almost a certainty now that, in the event of a close game, at least one player on the losing team will wallow about on the floor, covering his face …
From Anthony Esolen’s “Filthy Rich: The Unnoticed Gift of Trickle-Down Decadence:” “The poor teach us what our vices mean, because we have not the self-knowledge to see through the disguises we ourselves have given them. When we see the poor doing what we would not, let us not say, ‘There but for the grace of …
Mickey Edwards explains why he didn’t go to CPAC, the annual Conservative self-lovefest, arguing that the traditional conservatism of America has been supplanted by a state-aggrandizing European-style conservatism. I’m not sure if the shift is even that intellectual, or if it’s simply that Conservatives — like members of any tribe facing an enemy tribe — …
Call me crazy, but maybe it’s a good thing that the University of Iowa — and by extension, a great many schools in financially troubled times — has to decide not to have an Asian studies program, among other marginal offerings. Universities — their administrations, boards, faculties, and sometimes students — are almost uniformly gripped …
Maybe instead of pouring all this energy into haggling over claims in watered-down, non-primary source, lowest-common-denominator, utterly de-contextualized, ponderous textbooks, we ought to try harder to get kids to read more, and read more of what matters. Does anyone really think that one sentence about Cesar Chavez or Samuel Gompers is going to be the clincher between …
My favorite sometime nemesis Caitlin Flanagan has a piece in the recent Atlantic about this trend in urban schools to orient the school day and even the curriculum around the cultivation of big gardens. On the surface it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Flabby city kids growing their own vegetables, getting some time in the sun, …
“There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.” (Bertrand Russell)
Writer and teacher Nancie Atwell on the distressing need to convince government education officials of the benefits of literature: “. . . giving corporate interests a role in setting education policy is like letting foxes supervise the henhouse. These foxes are not vested in children’s reading books. They are interested in profitmaking—in selling prefab curricula, …
I always hate to see thoughtful, well-meaning people get mau-maued into apologizing for lucidity.
The Texas Board of Education strikes a blow against communist tracts cleverly disguised as children’s books. In other news, the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is discovered to be a former manager of the New York Yankees.
President Obama, The Washington Post tells us, will propose a major increase in education spending tonight. At first glance, one might be tempted to roll the eyes. It’s not like we haven’t been trundling along on this up-escalator long enough, after all. In the past twenty years alone we’ve doubled education spending. Yes, you read …
I recently saw a news clip about a mother who ordered her son to kill his pet as punishment for bad grades (the son’s, not the gerbil’s). An investigator says the woman was raised by a good family. Maybe so. When it comes time to decide, however, where to place her three children (for she is surely …
If this really is “…the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” then I think we’re all going to be just fine. And I have trouble seeing how a coded Christian verse on a rifle sight, while odd, is “literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun.” …
Believing, as Pat Robertson does, that the suffering of those you despise is inflicted by a god on your side, and that the suffering of those you pity is the result of a devil’s curse, seems to come awfully close to paganism. Which is ironic, because the source of Robertson’s conclusion about the Haitian curse …
Perhaps most disturbing about Robin West’s attack on homeschooling is that it’s published in a scholarly journal, even if it does come out of the University of Maryland. One might expect more thoughtfulness, even from a second-rate scholar. But instead we get breathless fear mongering like this: “In other words, in much of the country, if …
Here’s a conundrum. We put automatic sinks in public restrooms because we can’t trust our fellow man to turn off the water properly. We put automatic flushers on the toilets because we can’t trust him to flush. (We can’t trust him to lift the lid, either, so I suppose it’s a matter of time before …