Category: ideas

“Today the role of professor has veered to a ludicrously opposite extreme from the untrammelled freedom of the postwar years. Under huge pressure to be labelled a highly starred international researcher in the next research assessment exercise, a professor is expected to produce top-quality books and papers, while buried under a ferocious bureaucracy of business plans, mission statements, forecasts, audits of every kind, endless meetings, paperwork, quality inspections, performance assessments and interim reviews. It is no way to treat talented and creative people, on whom the next generation of scholars, and indeed our society, depends.”

“Most of us have seen the cyclonic swirl of water running down a drain, but what about the turbulent rush of the jet stream or the dance of an electromagnetic field? John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer program that turns the mathematical descriptions of these phenomena, technically known as vector fields, into visual patterns showing the fields frozen in time. Then he took the program a step further, allowing students in his introductory-level class on electricity and magnetism to design their own field patterns.”

In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, soldiers were turned into cold-blooded assassins by “a diabolical method of mind control based on memory’s emotional power.” The brainwashing technique seemed suspiciously familiar to a lot of actors, says Lee Siegel, because it was, in fact, nearly identical to the school known as Method acting, which was developed by “left-wing, socially adversarial” Russians. Hmmmm…

One name kept popping up in the international coverage of last week’s Democratic National Convention, and it wasn’t John Kerry. The name was H.L. Mencken, the famous journalistic curmudgeon who covered political conventions for nearly a half-century, and whose words describing the process have never been equaled: “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging… It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming.”

So maybe we don’t get tired after exercising because our muscles are tired. “Traditionally, fatigue was viewed as the result of over-worked muscles ceasing to function properly. But evidence is mounting that our brains make us feel weary after exercise. The idea is that the brain steps in to prevent muscle damage.”

Should Linda Ronstadt have been able to express her politics at a Vegas concert? John Rockwell: “Art exists in a context inevitably conditioned by politics, and politics and the values behind it express themselves in art. There is an obvious linkage between mass commercial art and politics, quite apart from individual actors and directors and pop musicians espousing a political view. Popular art makes money by reflecting what its producers think people want. But given the leftward tilt of Hollywood and our coastal cultural elites, the right has reason to complain that commercial television, films and music often advance a left-leaning political agenda.”

“The fleeting melancholy and euphoria associated with déjà vu have attracted the interest of poets, novelists, and occultists of many stripes. St. Augustine, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Tolstoy all wrote detailed accounts of such experiences. Most academic psychologists, however, have ignored the topic since around 1890, when there was a brief flurry of interest. The phenomenon seems at once too rare and too ephemeral to capture in a laboratory.”

Behind any story is the concept of “continuity.” It gives stories coherence, a logical framework in which the story can unfold. But “we have reached the point where continuity is almost an end in itself. Film directors and comic-book writers and TV producers will go to incredible lengths to make sure their creations have a natural-seeming history. This has resulted in some pretty strange narrative contortions.”