Monthly Archives: February 2011

  It has been a wild season for people who care about the liberal arts and sciences. It seems that every time you pick up a newspaper or switch on your digital news source, there’s word about some terrible damage … Continue reading →

  About 46 years ago, legislation called “the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965” established the two agencies we have known since as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for … Continue reading →

  It was Schopenhauer who listed “reviewing a book” as one of three ways to cope with not actually reading it. (Way past sarcasm to bitterness, there.) I suspect that Michael Roth, Wesleyan University president and the reviewer of Hubert Dreyfus’s and … Continue reading →

  Much of ordinary speech is made up of ossified metaphors, idioms so familiar they don’t register as figures of speech.  People take catnaps. They get dog tired.  A dreaded chore turns out to be a piece of cake.  Familiarity … Continue reading →