On June 26, Paul Basken reported in the Chronicle that Bob Berdahl, the president of the Association of American Universities, had recommended to Senator Lamar Alexander that the United States might not be able to afford our current number of research universities. Berdahl’s position is that a “fewer but better” policy would be worth considering, and his input is apparently behind the request of Alexander (and three other lawmakers) to the National Academies to “Study and report on the ‘top 10 actions’ that the government and research universities could take to maintain the quality of the universities and ensure the nation’s economic growth.” Berdahl, whose AAU represents the self-selected leading research universities in the country, admitted to Basken that “the...

I’m still trying to wake myself up from the groggy haze of Michael Jackson’s unexpected death — the coverage of which has become a global “media event” like none we’ve ever seen before. Not even Princess Di or JFK created this kind of immediate and mass-mediated mushroom clouding of fetishized televisual and cyber obsessions. That’s mostly because the media apparatus wasn’t nearly advanced enough to inundate us the way it can now: MJ updates through tweets and text messages and Internet pop-ups all day and night long. And then there are the 24-hour news cycles, the magazine covers, and the newspaper headlines. The saturation is surreal and science fictiony.

I’m one of the people who caught BET’s attempt to pay tribute to the “King of Pop” this weekend on its annual awards show. And maybe my...

Here we have two pieces in the press, one an op-ed column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Bob Barr and another a story in The Nation magazine by Sasha Abramsky.

Who ever thought that the man known as the social conservative attack dog in Congress in the 1990s and the most prominent organ of the left would come together? That says something about the War on Drugs — namely, that it’s absurd.

Barr never really deserved his reputation as a culture warrior in the 1990s, a profile he acquired during the Lewinsky Affair because he appeared on late-night television shows several times a week (it seemed) to...

Get ready, human beings, to drink the brew now simmering in the kettles of neuroscience. Last night’s 60 Minutes, narrated by Leslie Stahl, reported on the work going on at a couple of neuroscience labs. In case you haven’t been paying attention, neuroscience has come a long way from playing around with twitching frog legs. Now, using computers and MRI’s, neuroscientists can precisely locate the multiple parts in the brain where thoughts are occurring and are moving toward understanding how to predict them.

At Carnegie Mellon, for example, researchers Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell conducted what Just cheerily identified as “thought identification” research....

When Mae West said, “What a tragedy for a man, what an opportunity for a woman,” she summed up one of the ways in which women’s comedy differs from men’s — in some cases, women can see possibilities for comedy and humor where men can only see failure.

I’m not only thinking about governors, of course. But I’m not not thinking about them.

When things fall apart, women’s comedy comes into ascendency. Women are often their funniest after their worst experiences.

Women use comedy to narrate their experience and so diffuse the pain.

If you’re a woman, how many times have you called your best friend in the middle of the night, woken her up from a sound sleep to tell her the most horrible story about being abandoned at a party, being set up on the world’s worst blind date, about being fired,...

Sam Tanenhaus has a very odd piece in this morning’s New York Times. Tanenhaus is an historian who edits the paper’s weekly book review and who occasionally writes think pieces for the Sunday “Week in Review” section of the paper. He is a very smart and well-informed person on cultural matters, but this week I don’t think he gets it right.

“Sound of Silence: The Culture Wars Take a Break” is an apparently favorable comment on President Obama’s decision to appoint former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Tanenhaus sees the appointment as part of “an emerging politics of accommodation,” since Leach was a Republican during his 30 years in the Congress. That may be right, but as Sam...

The Financial Times yesterday reported that the ordinarily low-drama U.S. President angrily denied that his health-care proposal is designed to put private insurers out of business.

Obama proposes to offer a federal health-care plan that allows anyone to join a program like the popular Medicare. (Who says America doesn’t have single payer, national health insurance: caveat — it’s for people over 65!)

This plan would probably be better and cheaper than private health insurance and that’s why the insurers are fighting the public plan option. Obama is probably right not all of them will go out of business, but it may hurt profit margins.

Obama’s public plan option is the best of three currently under most-prominent discussion.

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NOTE: Thanks to a reader for pointing out that I wrote “Adirondacks” instead of “Appalachian Trail.” The error has been corrected.

Ever since yesterday’s tearful confession by Governor Mark Sanford that no, actually he hadn’t run off without notice to go hiking alone on the Appalachian Trail but instead had gone to Argentina to end his affair, a panoply of experts in psychology, sex addiction, marriage counseling, and politics — on television, in the papers, and in the blogs — has been earnestly inquiring why a man who’s such a rising star in the galaxy of Republican governors, who is married to such “a lovely wife” and has “four wonderful kids,” would do such a thing.

What planet do these...

A couple of days ago, President Drew Faust sent an e-mail to “Members of the Harvard Community” commenting on the events of the past year for her university. She acknowledged the serious economic problems that have confronted Harvard this year, but was upbeat: “Our focus belongs not on what we have lost, but on what we have.” She urged Harvardians “not for a moment to forget the immense contributions that our community continues to make to the advancement of knowledge.” Like the president of Princeton, speaking at our commencement, she also stressed that “the learning that happens here can help us improvise through times of uncertainty and come out stronger and wiser, more resilient, more adaptable, and better prepared to lead fulfilling lives.” But careful readers of Faust’s message will have noticed Faust’s...

George Leef, vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, takes issue with a recent report I co-authored about college graduation rates. We criticized colleges with unusually low graduation rates compared to peer institutions with similar admissions selectivity. Leef is having none of it:

Even at schools with very low graduation rates, some students do graduate. They discipline themselves and work hard enough to earn the credits they need to graduate. It’s not that those who graduate were the “lucky” ones. Each student is in control of his destiny; either he does what is required, or he doesn’t. We’re not talking about dice here. We’re talking about human beings with...