If he were still alive, Sigmund Freud might have been a Jeremy Lin fan. At the very least, he would have recognized what was going on when an ESPN.com writer used the headline “Chink in their armor” to describe the Knicks’ first loss since Lin took over as point guard. “A suppression of a previous intention to say something,” Freud wrote, “is the indispensable condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue.” ESPN offered an apology and fired the headline writer. But the slip of the tongue, one among a list of many other awkward and revealing moments that have accompanied ... Read More
Finding a New Gandhi in the Book ‘Great Soul’
August 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Is there anything left to say about Mohandas K. Gandhi that has not already been said? If the sheer volume of writing by and about Gandhi is any indication, the answer is a resounding no. Consider the section of any university library where the books on Gandhi are located. There is, first of all, the works of the very prolific man himself. His Collected Works — autobiography, political treatises, letters, newspaper articles — now run to more than 100 thick volumes. The sheer weight and often contradictory nature of his output is both an archival goldmine and a great challenge for ... Read More
The Picture for Men: Superhero or Slacker
August 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
At the end of the fourth season of the critically loved and chronically underwatched Friday Night Lights, the former football star Tim Riggins martyrs himself for the sake of his brother and newborn nephew. For much of the season, he and his brother Billy have been stripping down stolen cars and making the type of fast cash they cannot make legitimately. Tim wants the quick cash to fund his desire to buy a bit of sun-drenched Texas countryside, and Billy needs it for his new duties as a father. As the season finale starts, the brothers are talking to a lawyer and working through their ... Read More
The Crisis in Liberal Arts Education
July 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Consider an anecdotal piece of evidence on the crisis of liberal arts education in America. A student recently came into my office, seeking advice on whether to declare sociology or Asian-American studies as her major. I took a deep breath. The student explained that her mother preferred sociology because she recognized it as a discipline. She, on the other hand, preferred Asian-American studies because she liked the classes better. The career services counselor told her she was going about it the wrong way. Think about the type of work you are interested in, the counselor advised. The ... Read More
Outsourcing an American Education
May 22, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
There is a bill currently making its way through the Indian parliament — The Foreign Educational Institutions Bill — that would open up for universities in the West, particularly in the U.S., a massive English-speaking market. Massive is the key word. We're talking hundreds of thousands of Indian students reaching college age who are interested in an education that would allow them to better participate in a globalizing economy. At first glance, the passage of the bill, which is being pushed ahead by Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, benefits ... Read More
(Eastern) Religion Is the Last Refuge
February 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Tiger Woods just returned from nearly three months of radio silence and read a 15-minute statement that was carried live by all the major television networks. This in itself is astounding. Woods is not, after all, a publicly elected figure. In turn, he apologized for his actions, got angry at the paparazzi for hounding his family, said he was in therapy, made clear that there has never been domestic violence in and around the Woods mansion, and intoned, to the chagrin of the PGA, that his return to golf may be later rather than sooner. It was, all in all, a solid piece of American public ... Read More
The Lives of Saints (and Sinners)
July 24, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the past year or so, readers of literary biographies have had plenty on their plate. Thick books have been published on the lives of Ralph Ellison, Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthlme, John Cheever, V.S. Naipaul and Gabriel García Márquez. And if you look across the publishing spectrum, the genre is, of course, not limited to stories about writers. Bookstores and best-seller lists are full of biographies of politicians, captains of industry and historical figures. With his books on Harry Truman and John Adams, David McCullough is his own cottage industry. So what ... Read More
In Memoirs We Trust
July 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
This past Sunday, the wildly popular memoirist Frank McCourt died. The popularity of McCourt's most famous book, Angela's Ashes, is based on a combination of strong writing and close-to-the-bone honesty, written in the memoir genre that Americans love to read. Publishers dole out high advances and readers eat up memoirs by such public figures as Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Dick Cheney recently joined this group when Simon & Schuster reached a $2 million deal with the former vice president to write his life story. But a memoirist like McCourt falls into a different ... Read More
New Conversations on Race
July 2, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Race, of course, is a defining component of American life.But in the past several months, the conversation around it seems to have moved to a new place. By now, the racial significance of President Obama's election is almost old news. And with the Supreme Court's recent decision in regard to the New Haven fire department and the accusation by the political right of Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor's racism, talk of reverse racism is in the air. It is far too premature to link purported moments of reverse racism to racism's end, but these different events do suggest that we are ready ... Read More
Falling Hard for Bad Movies
June 30, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Consider for a moment the social function of movie reviews. At the most basic level, they serve as a guideline for what to see immediately, what to place on your Netflix queue and what to avoid at all costs. The decision you make is based, on one hand, on the number of critics who have given the film a positive or negative review. Film marketers are always happy to underscore that their film made it onto multiple end-of-the-year top 10 lists. On the other hand, the decision to see or not to see is based on the judgment of a particular critic whose tastes overlap with your own. Reviewing ... Read More
