Holy cow. A Russian spy ring busted by the FBI—a “sleeper network” planted 20 years ago, consisting of 11 undercover agents posing as regular Americans, suddenly outed.  There they were, the whole time—regular Americans with marriages and kids, and with names like “Cynthia” and “Richard." Living in the suburbs, they were holding down good jobs, buying homes, and tending to their gardens. These arrests come as a real jolt. Now that the Cold War is a thing of the past, we aren’t used to Russian spy rings. Even the words sound old-fashioned. The story also evokes spy novels, of course—John Le Carré, or Tom Clancy, or with Anna Chapman, one of the alleged spies, Ian Fleming. Chapman looks like a pretty hot item—the kind of woman who’s seen some serious cuddling with James Bond.

My husband, who’s read every spy novel ever written, appears oddly uninterested in these latest real-world spies. ...

On Sunday, The Boston Globe Magazine ran a long article by Neil Swidey on anonymous blog commenters. Swidey tracked down and interviewed several “heavy users”—anonymous, online posters who treat commenting almost as if it’s their job. Swidey found several heavy users (of both sexes, on the left and the right) who were not only willing to talk to him about what they were doing, and why, but who were even willing to give him their real names. The article noted that given the steady increase in incivility by commenters, many news Web sites are now questioning their commitment to anonymous posting.  

Here at Brainstorm, we rarely see over-the-top incivility, peppered with foul language and ad hominem attacks coming from what Web-site moderators call “screamers, troublemakers, and trolls.” (These sorts of commenters refused to talk to Swidey, who wrote that “the loudest, most aggressive...

Lady Gaga, the intensely artificial, popular, silly, and self-aware post-Madonna sexpot singer made for yet another great New York Post headline last week: “Gaga Goes Batty.” Now she’s the subject of Tufts University feminist philosophy professor Nancy Bauer’s blog in the “Opinionator” section of The New York Times. What’s not to love about our culture? Here we are, in for another round of high/low: the “paper of record,” the tabloid of trash, or the professor of philosophy, the vulgar pop singer sensation. Vulgarity has always played a critical role in Western culture, of course (think Aristophanes, Socrates, and dung). The only difference nowadays is that smart intellectuals, especially in universities, treat it as profound stuff, philosophizing about such pop-cult phenomena as Lady Gaga as if these things are no different from philosophizing about the nature of the soul.

But you have...

I’d estimate that my husband and I own about 2,000 books. As personal libraries go, this isn’t an especially large number. My friends Alfred and Barbara, for example, must own closer to 10,000 books. Our books live very quiet, orderly sorts of lives, mostly standing in their assigned space on their assigned shelf in their assigned bookcase. We know most of them well, even if it’s been years since we held them in our hands. There are others we know hardly at all. There are also some books that only I know, or only my husband knows, or even those neither of us knows, save for the title.

We’ve sorted our books in ways that make sense to us, not caring whether our system makes sense to anybody else. For example, we have a large, specially built bookcase dedicated to over-sized art books (at least 13 inches tall and each weighing over a ton) that are almost all monographs on individual artists...

It’s a good thing for everyone involved in Bravo TV’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, that none of them has the slightest sense of shame. If they did, they would have run as far and as fast as possible to get away from this dog of a program. (Work of Art, which premiered last night, is a new reality show, this time about contemporary art; it features 14 wannabe artists competing for fame and fortune.)

Reviews of the show so far range from it’s got problems but it “works” (The New York Times—whose TV critic took pains to explain that one of the judges of Work of Art being married to a colleague had no influence on her judgment), to it’s just plain weak (Christopher Knight at the L.A. Times, in an appropriately snide piece). On the show, we watch a group of unknown artists competing with one another in a series of art-school-like projects that are then judged by a...

Reading the various articles in The Chronicle over the past year about the decline of interest in the humanities is like being stuck at a railroad crossing waiting for a two-mile-long freight train to pass. Many of the boxcars seem numbingly similar, carrying matter-of-fact accounts of how and why the humanities no longer hold center stage either in universities or in the world at large. Others are full of grief and despair over the matter. Every once in a while, a brightly colored boxcar cheerily reaffirms the value of studying the humanities. That’s what David Brooks and Stanley Fish each do, in their respective columns in today's New York Times. Yet their lovely paeans to the humanities will surely be followed by yet more boxcars full of lamentations. This is a long, slow train, and the caboose is nowhere to be seen.  

I’m a painter—a useless occupation if ever there was one—and a...

In 55 B.C., Pompey dedicated his theater by mounting two animal hunts a day for five days in a row—a stunning spectacle meant to be a crowd pleaser (the Romans, as every school kid knows, derived great pleasure from watching animals “hunted” and killed in their circuses) as well as a vivid demonstration that Rome’s power extended even to the wildest reaches of Africa. According to Cicero, however, the unexpected happened: 

"The last day was that of the elephants, and on that day the mob and crowd were greatly impressed, but manifested no pleasure. Indeed the result was a certain compassion and a kind of feeling that that huge beast has a fellowship with the human race."

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder writes with far less abstraction: “But Pompey's elephants when they had lost all hope of escape tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty,...

The French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois died on Monday at the age of 98. She gained international art-star status very late in life, beginning when she turned 70 (unknown, ambitious artists everywhere  take note—there's still time). Bourgeois’s art ended up in four Whitney Biennial exhibitions (to be chosen for even one is considered a huge deal for an artist) and in 1993, she was the American representative at the Venice Biennale—the most prestigious of the big international art exhibitions. Her work became the subject of a series of large retrospectives at several major museums in Europe and the United States.

Bourgeois’s art is jolting, disturbing and often bitingly witty, weaving together memory, loss, sex, and the nuclear family into art objects that are alternately freakishly bulbous (multiple breasts, cropped phalluses, cut-off limbs and torsos) or scary and spiky...

The latest on the never-ending Gulf disaster is that some 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day (not the 1000 barrels a day BP first reported) are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the subsequent failure of the blowout preventer. All efforts to plug the underwater well up to now have failed.

It doesn’t really matter who’s at fault or who’s in charge—whether it’s BP or the Obama administration—except in terms of money (who will pay what and how much) and politics (whether or not this catastrophe will stick like oil to Obama the way Katrina stuck to Bush). Despite everyone everywhere screaming “Fix it!” no one knows (as in possesses practical knowledge) how to fix it. Already the largest environmental disaster in American history, the gushing oil threatens to continue gushing another two months—right up until August, when a relief well that’s in...

I see from my last post on the Gulf oil drilling disaster that a few commentators found me too arrogant for their taste. In beginning and ending with a reference to the acerbic H.L. Mencken, whose opinion on the smallness of American intelligence is well known to all but the ignorant, I hoped to put in context my lack of confidence that Americans are prepared to tackle complex 21st-century problems, such as the necessity to “wean” (note that ubiquitously used word “wean" when people talk of Americans and their dependence on oil, implying, of course, that we are babies) ourselves not merely from oil, but from fossil fuels in general. (Too long a sentence, but you get the point.)

As every college kid does not know, the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day—almost half of it gobbled up by our passenger cars. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, we consume 2...