It's been more than a little depressing to listen to debate performances over the last couple of months, in which candidates seem to gain in popularity by refining a formula of indignation and hostility. "How dare you," says the candidate, puffing out his chest, wondering how any questioner could sink...

In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other in England), but there was a problem: a long, public record of Dorothea already being married...

The news about the American education system has been bleak over the last year -- from elementary schools that seem "designed to fail" to for-profit universities that are scooping up borrowed tuition dollars without providing their graduates with much hope of gainful employment. No surprise then that the American public...

In the first half of 2011, we heard the word"deficit" in wave after wave of political discourse. The Republicans used it as a signifier of Washington's lack of fiscal self-control -- of an intellectually and morally bankrupt government that spent our money without concern for the views of those who...

The president of the Hastings Center asked me to address the links between its mission in bioethics and the mission of universities and colleges dedicated to liberal arts education. The founders of the Hastings Center knew that science was too important to leave in the hands only of specialists, and...

"The last few weeks have been especially hectic," I told my older son recently, when we had our regular phone conversation to bridge the distance between West Coast and East. "Do I say that every week," I wondered. He, too, is increasingly busy, as are so many of the people...

I recently received an email forwarded to groups of students and faculty from colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley. The message described the excessive use of force by UC Berkeley police in their attempt to dismantle tents in Sproul Plaza. I was in that plaza a...

The Occupy Wall Street protests have become an important topic on college campuses. At Wesleyan, some of our students have joined the group in Zuccotti Park in New York, and others have found a variety of ways of expressing their support. Given the mainstream media's treatment of the movement, it's...

Diane Arbus made arresting, absorbing photographs of dwarfs, twins, giants, nudists and carnies. "I really believe," she said, "there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them." Together with other artists expanding the boundaries of photography in the 1960s, she altered the way we understand portraiture and thus...

Recently the trustees of my university were in town for their annual retreat. Our theme this year was "the innovative university," and we worked together to think through how Wesleyan might get out in front of some of the major changes in higher education. Technology, of course, is driving many...

Manufacturing Hysteria:
A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America
By Jay Feldman

Manufacturing Hysteria offers a chilling overview of how American political culture has generated domestic enemies to justify massive infringements of rights.

Jay Feldman begins with the World War I era and charts how...

As the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon approaches, hundreds of journalists, commentators, writers and artists are telling us how to mark this occasion. On my left, Noam Chomsky is there to remind us of what he always knows before any events have...

At Wesleyan University today is the first day of classes, and many people are annoyed to be losing their last long weekend of summer, or imagine that we are sending some kind of signal to add further insult to the many injuries already suffered by the labor movement. We've actually...

Rebels in Paradise recounts the story of how adventurous contemporary art developed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, and how an "art scene" took off in the city during the '60s. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is especially interested in the "scene" part -- of how little-known artists joined together to form...

This week, while President Obama and House Speaker Boehner gave dueling speeches of blame and recrimination, the Pew Research Center released a report showing the extraordinary increase in the disparity of wealth between whites and nonwhites in the United States. As the New York Times reported:

The study,...

On a slow Sunday morning browsing through the paper, I came across Nicholas Kristof's column describing what he calls "our broken escalator." He is referring to our education system, what has been for so many of us the moving stairway of social mobility. He details the ways that...

What a week it has been! On Monday the New York Times' conservative columnist, David Brooks, was criticizing the Republican Party in the harshest terms. On Friday, the paper's liberal economist, Paul Krugman, was attacking President Obama for adopting the conservative fiscal agenda and betraying his...

What are the chances? That a child surrounded by illiteracy, shuffling between his family's new life in Lisbon and their roots in the countryside, will have such an intense appetite for words that he relishes pages from discarded newspapers, seizes on fragments of Molière in a guidebook, and will one...

Reading David Denby's New Yorker review of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, I was struck by the phrase he uses to describe the director: "The ultimate fan of great musicians and writers, the culture-mad student forever renewing the pantheon."

What does it mean to renew the pantheon? In...

Recently I participated in two interesting public discussions about the value of a liberal arts education in America today. The first came through an invitation from CNN to talk about the importance of science education in the context of a broadly based college experience. CNN was responding to increasing concern...