Oh dear, another fake memoir. This one comes from the imagination of Herman Rosenblat, a Nazi concentration camp survivor who heartily embellished his story. (Surviving a concentration camp apparently isn’t enough of a hook.) He’s been caught adding a foolish love tale about his future wife — a kid at the time, as he was — tossing him an apple over the barbed-wire fence. The duped publisher and TV book promoter Oprah Winfrey (again!) are in full apology mode.

I went straight to Google and typed in “Fake Memoirs.” Like a mushroom that sprouted up overnight, a stub on Herman Rosenblat had popped up at the top of Wikipedia’s list of notorious authors of fake memoirs and journals. (Of course, I wondered vaguely...

“Hey, what about us?”

Two weeks ago the Modern Language Association and Teagle Foundation issued a white paper that lays out a set of guidelines and principles for literature and language curricula. It’s a remarkable document, and everyone involved in curricular projects in secondary and higher education should read it. (Go here and scroll to the bottom for the pdf.)

Anybody who has sat through meetings focused on English language arts and foreign language curricula at the high-school level, or on English at the higher-education level, knows that one of the sticky questions is where to place literature, particularly Great Books, in the program. Cultural studies folks don’t like the...

My deal with myself is that I’m allowed to watch anything I want when I’m on the treadmill. So I’m watching a show I’ve never seen before — Intervention (more about this bizarre program in a later post, don’t worry) — and oddly enough the ads that keep popping up are for NutriSystem. I hate them, but I’m watching them in order to put in my time on the treadmill (don’t get me started on irony). I don’t know what struck me as odd about the ad placements since the theme of the entire show was simply restraint, withholding, abstinence, and self-deprivation.

But all that aside, what really got my attention was the fact that NutriSystem offers distinctly different diet plans for men and for women.

At least that’s what their ads say. There I am in my unfinished basement under the bare light bulb...

Would you pull the lever?

In a famous 1963 psychology experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Yale, a man posing in a white lab coat asked a group of subjects to administer painful and sometimes dangerous electric shocks to innocent people. The shocks were feigned, but the subjects thought they were real, and the “victims” pretended to feel pain.

Almost all the subjects in the experiment readily complied with the instructions given by the man in the lab coat to administer stronger and stronger “shocks” to their victims, even when the victims cried out in pain. These were ordinary Americans, not notoriously evil people, willingly inflicting more and more pain on innocent people because someone in authority told them it was the right...

I was saddened to see the brief obit by Tamar Lewin on Sam Huntington in this morning’s New York Times. The photo that accompanied the piece was taken some years ago, which was probably just as well, because Sam had been quite unwell in recent years. The likeness reminded me both of the young Sam Huntington I knew as a student at Harvard in the 1950s, and of his widow, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, then a Radcliffe undergraduate and a close friend of mine.

One of the great virtues of Harvard for undergraduates in the years shortly after World War II was the presence of an extraordinarily talented group of resident graduate students and junior faculty who had...

On Christmas Eve I was thinking not of sugarplum fairies and trimmings and trees but of a dipsomaniacal Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on an acid trip (if you’re wondering, he walked eight batters in the process) and once attempted to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds lineup (he made it through the first three guys before Tony Perez ducked his way out to a base on balls and he tossed one at the head of Johnny Bench and the umpire ejected him). Dock Ellis, he who wore his hair in curlers so the perspiration dripping down would make his spitball easier to, um, actualize, had died the weekend before, and I wanted to get my hands on the memoir he wrote with a future poet laureate, Donald Hall. Maybe...

I have been a lifelong moviegoer, and each holiday break I try to squeeze in as many films as is possible. I began writing brief movie reviews 20 years back, and over the years I have shared them with an increasingly long list of friends. This year I’m happy to share them with Brainstorm readers.

“Relationships” seem to be the predominant theme this season — but when is it not?

The number of films is shorter than usual this year due to the brief time frame between graduation ceremonies and Christmas. I’m missing a few important movies that will open in most theaters in the next few days. All except one of the listed movies was seen over the holidays.

These are on a scale of one to four stars. Most all of those listed are worthy of your ticket purchase, with many very highly recommended. I welcome your feedback.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Tip of the hat to an anonymous commenter over at Household Opera’s entry on Adjuncting in the Tar Pits:

As one of the many Americans considering a descent on the inauguration ceremonies next month, even without any actual tickets in hand (and nary a perfunctory response to my queries about possibly obtaining some from my local Congressman), I have been following the “transition” fairly closely. And I’m not just talking about the president elect’s cabinet picks. I also mean his decisions for the ceremony itself. The brilliant choice of poet Elizabeth Alexander; the more controversial decision to ask Rick Warren to offer up the day’s prayer.

Obama is certainly trying to demonstrate his commitment to an inclusive political conversation that allows for many different ideological positions. Frank Rich persuasively challenges the limits and contours of that move vis-a-vis the Warren choice in today’s New York Times. But it is...

I watched a minor college football bowl game last night — the Motor City Bowl in poor, depressed Detroit, between Florida Atlantic University and Central Michigan University — and I noticed something that prompted this post. There are basically two types of college football uniforms — call them “traditional” and “designer” — and we’re in a visually awkward transition between the two. (FAU exemplified the former, CMU the latter.) An aficionado of athletic garb who went into a profound funk when the The Village Voice discontinued its sports section a few years ago, and with it, the crucial feature “Uni Watch,” I’m of two minds about recent developments.

But first, let me explain what I mean by “traditional” and “designer” uniforms.

Traditional uniforms have jerseys...