Is there really beauty in failure? We sometimes romanticize failure as a kind of revelation. Honey in the garbage heap, lesson in the crease. But lately I’ve been thinking about schooling. We advocate a certain kind of failure, risk, and experimentation as essential pedagogical values in the progressive classroom, and that’s beautiful. But I’m talking [...]

As some of you may know from my recent post, last week, Jennifer Egan’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. This morning it was also long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. A Visit From the Goon Squad is brilliant. It’s not a novel in the [...]

There is nothing funny or surprising about the things you let slacken when you’re overextended. I’m hard at work on my graduate thesis; it is the one taut thread of my life at the moment. It greets me in the morning with an open-handed slap, bullies me all day, and elbows its way into my [...]

Writing in Tuesday’s New York Times Op/Ed page, Susan Engel describes a truly remarkable scenario: teenagers, left to their own devices, learning complex ma thema tical concepts, reading tough books, and investigating multi-faceted questions with interdisciplinary implications, like “why do we cry?” The scenario is real, and happen ing presently in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. Her [...]

Throughout my childhood, in the early- to mid-1980s, LSD was considered bad news. We were sternly warned by teachers, parents, made-for-TV movies, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign never to try it. We were told that if we ever did, we’d likely do something fatally stupid — like attempt to fly out of a [...]

The genius of James Fallows’ new piece in The Atlantic is that he takes some of the best values of traditional journalism—skepticism, research, fairness, eagerness to question authority and topple conventional wisdom—and he applies them to traditional journalism. He disputes the tediously common view that old journalism is better than new. Unless they are different from [...]

On Wednesday night, Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate and Governor Scott Walker pushed through a portion of the Budget Repair Bill (perhaps illegally), effectively gutting the union rights of public workers in that state. I’ve been in communication with Morgan Harlow, a writer and photographer liv ing in Madison, who has been on the [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3fUqdGXLbM&feature=player_embedded It’s less than 48 hours after the earthquake, tsunami, and now the nuclear power plants’ integrity loss, two of them. It’s Saturday morning here on the East Coast of the U.S. Two of my children will attend birthday parties today, a third will go to a St. Paddy’s Day event, another will work out, [...]

Dear Los Angeles Times, Regarding your headlines* today on the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the photo you posted is not Jennifer Egan. In addition,  I would also like to point out that you mention the name of Mr. Franzen’s novel, the one that didn’t win but it’s true was written by a male, while [...]

Last week President Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal to nine distinguished recipients. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal recipients included “….novelists Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates; historians Bernard Bailyn, Jacques Barzun and Gordon Wood; Library of America founding President Daniel Aaron; biographer and critic Arnold Rampersad; American Council of Learned Societies President Stanley Nider Katz; [...]

Eric Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster, Blackie, fetched nearly $1 million at auction back in 2004, with all its nicks, scratches, and cigarette burns. Seems like a lot, but hey, it’s ol’ Slowhand’s guitar. He really played “White Room” on it, really passed out while cradling it in his track-marked arms, really dragged it around the world. [...]

I’ve always loved a good talent show. Doesn’t matter what time or how far, if there’s a talent show, I’m there. Admittedly, I’m not usually the one performing, but I am a devoted audience member with the enthusiasm of a thousand parents. Maybe my love for talent shows comes from my years as a teaching artist, or [...]

Looking back on my life as if it were a road, I can see that I’ve built little memory temples all along the way; I’ve fetishized moments that might have seemed insignificant to an observer, but that somehow signified everything to me. I was reminded of one of those moments when I watched My Fair [...]