My first thought on reading yesterday’s opening line to the Chronicle story on Texas A&M rating professors based on their individual “bottom-line value” was, “Oh look, how clever! The Chronicle is running an Onion story.” Not so. They ran a real story about Texas A&M’s plan to evaluate how much professors are worth based on their salaries, the research money they bring in, and the amount of money they “generate from teaching” (presumably tuition dollars brought by each individual student in a class) and then (can this really be true? Shouldn't it be the other way around?) "add the money generated by each professor and subtract that amount from his or her salary to get a bottom-line value for each." Any way you look at it, they're searching for profit and loss accounts for each individual professor. (All you non-profit-making Latin and fine arts professors, get ready to get lost.)

This...

In my previous post, I observed that whenever I blog on art, there’s nary a peep. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, there’s a cacophony of voices. Although facts are often tossed around in discussions of art and politics, both subjects are matters of opinion. How is it we’re so insecure about offering our opinions about art in public, while so bold in expressing our opinions about politics?

In my first post, I suggested that a lot of people hold back offering opinions about art because they think they don’t know enough about it to talk about it intelligently. Understandably, then, even if they use a pseudonym, they’re reluctant to go on record talking about art in a public forum like Brainstorm. Educated people, in particular, don’t want to appear unsophisticated, and when talking about art, it’s easy to end up sounding either like a Philistine or a nincompoop. A few readers...

I’ve noticed during the nearly three years I’ve been blogging for Brainstorm that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, people are at the ready with their opinions. Here’s the first of two posts on the why these two very different subjects, both of which are arenas in which people readily form opinions, cause such different reactions when it comes to taking a public stand.

Unlike words, or mathematical formulae, or scientific studies, most art automatically prompts one of three reactions: I like it, I don’t like it, or I’m indifferent to it. While people concede to art historians—and even artists—special knowledge about the who, what, when, where and how of art, they don’t accord them special privileges in the opinion area.  Most people firmly believe that art is a subjective matter, and that all opinions about it are...

Other painters wouldn’t put it quite this way, I’m sure, but painting the kind of clean abstract paintings I paint (the neat sort that are made up of clearly defined shapes) is a whole lot like weeding and vacuuming.  True, people generally weed and vacuum out of necessity, whereas painters paint pictures out of desire (ever since modernism, that is—things were significantly different before the 19th century). Yet for all their differences, painters, weeders, and vacuumers share a deep longing for perfection.

Take weeding. “What a mess,” I always think, surveying the jumble of weeds that have taken over my garden.  Crawling on my hands and knees among the flowers, I furiously rip out enormous clumps of huge weeds (which are, of course, nothing more than plants human beings have decided do not deserve to live in a certain place). I note with satisfaction that the flowers, previously hidden...

In returning to the subject of the proposed mosque and community center near Ground Zero (my original post is here) I’ve now learned that many Americans are not merely deeply irrational, but proud of it. It’s not enough to remind them of the obvious—that the proposed mosque is not at the "sacred site" of the former Trade Towers (what's actually closest to the site—literally across the street from it—is the hugely popular and bustling discount department store known as “Century 21," famous for European designer brands), or that the mosque is part of a community center open to all, with a stated purpose of bringing together people of all faiths, or that the people living in the immediate neighborhood (me included) support it. Nor is it enough to remind them that we either abide by our Constitution or we don’t.

Offering various excuses ranging from “emotions are still too raw,” to...

Subject: Complaint to Colgate-Palmolive Consumer Affairs Department

Dear Sirs,

As a loyal fan of Palmolive dishwashing soap, I was dismayed to discover that your newly designed top broke after I’d used it only about 10 times. I always loved the old top! It worked perfectly—easy to use with the flick of the thumb. There was utterly nothing wrong with it. Please consider returning to the old design!

Yours truly,

Laurie Fendrich


Subject: In response to your Colgate inquiry. #020855133B

To: Laurie Fendrich
From:    Colgate-Palmolive Consumer Affairs
Subject: Response to Your Email

Dear Ms Fendrich:

Thank you for contacting us about your experience with Palmolive Original Dish
Liquid.  We appreciate having this opportunity to help you.

Our company is widely recognized for our thorough and rigorous quality control
procedures. Every package is checked by electronic scanners as well as Quality
Assurance ...

Although I tend to agree with Maureen Dowd’s opinions in her New York Times columns, every once in a while she gets things wrong. Like today, when she sings the praises of the “serendipity of ending up with [college] roommates that you like, despite your differences, or can’t stand, despite your similarities, or grow to like, despite your reservations.” She writes that this “is an experience that toughens you up and broadens you out for the rest of life.” Responding to a Wall Street Journal article about the increasing number of incoming freshmen who are turning to Web sites like Facebook’s RoomBug or URoomSurf to find their freshmen roommates, Dowd argues that choosing your own freshman roommates, instead of following the usual practice of letting the college do it for you, “retards creativity and social growth.” Furthermore, she thinks that the practice of colleges assigning roommates ...

In his column in today’s The New York Times, Ross Douthat reflects on the implications of last week’s federal court ruling overturning California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. He notes that what we call “traditional marriage” (a husband and wife—and their children—living together as one unit) is an invention only a couple of centuries old. Before that, “married” couples and their kids lived much more communally, usually in an extended family. Douthat also points out that there are many viable ways—both within Western culture and in other cultures—that the sexes live well together, and raise their children well, other than our traditional American-style marriage. He then reaches a startling, if subtle, conclusion about our traditional marriage. It’s worth quoting here in full:

The lifelong commitment of a gay couple is more impressive than the serial monogamy of straights....

My daughter Phoebe sent me a link to a Web site today whose beauty and profundity took my breath away. In the subject heading, she wrote one word: “Fascinating.” Staring at the pictures on the Web site actually altered my brain.

Like almost everyone alive today, I see the 1940s in America through the lens of black, white, and gray. Why? Because so much of the era was recorded either in black and white photographs or black and white film. Should you choose to scroll through the 70 photographs on this Web site, you’ll encounter the 1940s portrayed in brilliant, shocking color. Photographers participating in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information program took the photos. (The Farm Security Administration was a program that put photographers to work during the Great Depression; it started with studying how rural America lived, but later it expanded into a program whose...

It’s hardly surprising to read that half of all Americans oppose the plan to build a 13-story mosque and interfaith community center two blocks north of Ground Zero. Americans were traumatized by the sudden, terrible, brazen attacks made directly on American soil by fanatical Islamicists. Couple this with the fact that many (if not most) Americans are nominally Christian or Jewish, or de facto secular, and know next to nothing about Islam, and out comes a sloppy conflation of the actions of a relatively small group of Islamicist radicals with Islam and Muslims in general.

Yet that collapsing of distinctions is no different from seeing all Christianity as fanatical because of the actions of its fringe.  Mind you, Republican leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (the latter calling on “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the mosque as an “unnecessary provocation”—as if peace-seeking...