In the year ahead, Texas plans to reduce its arts budget by 77 percent; Wisconsin by 67 percent. Kansas will eliminate arts funding altogether. Even New York, with an economy that is driven by culture, will cut funding by 12 percent. Since National Endowment for the Arts statutes don’t allow a state to receive a distribution without an arts budget, Kansas will receive no appropriation from the NEA either, leaving the arts without a penny of public support in that state (“As Appropriations Dry Up, Arts Infrastructure Is Dismantled“).

One of the main reasons economics in general, and the discussion of politics in particular, bugs me so much is that so little energy seems to be devoted to…

I work online, and I think online writing classes work at least as well as face to face teaching. I love technology and gadgets too, even though they are too often tainted by consumerism. I am not certain of the source, but someone left this Douglas Adams quote as a comment on my site recently:

First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII – and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.

I went on short trip last weekend to Meramec Caverns– my GPS is the greatest thing since sliced bread on these trips–and I was struck, once again, by the image of people waving their cell phones around in the air, trying to get what we euphemistically call “service.”

I understand the impulse. The motel and the campground that surrounds the…

I lived overseas just long to realize that I had to either come home or accept a kind of permanent status as an expatriate. I didn’t come home because I loved my country, though, I came home because I missed and loved my culture. I’ve never been a patriot, because, as the cliché says, it’s the last refuge of scoundrels.

A so-called “love” for a nation is more than a little creepy, and I can’t see much difference between a false patriotism and an authentic patriotism. There’s something inherently false about loving something as abstract and intangible as a nation. How can a nation be an object of love? It can’t.

What people really love is their culture in…

I don’t know how I missed it, but I just stumbled across a word that describes a phenomena that I find both fascinating and repugnant: agnotology, “is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.” It’s not just the right, as Doug Henwood has documented, it’s taken root in so-called alternative media, too.

A certain segment of the right– if that’s the word– rejects evolution, denies global warming, and believes that Obama was born and raised in Kenya. On the left– if that’s the word– we have 911 conspiracies, vaccine paranoia, and all sorts of quack medicine. Our nuts don’t seem to have the national credibility that right-wing nuts seem…

Critical thinking is at the center of education, and critical thinking is a complicated, often uncomfortable process. It’s often very emotional, for one thing, but it can’t just be emotional, it also has to involve careful reasoning. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s open-ended. You can be certain you understand one thing today and then tomorrow a bit of new information, or an event that you can’t help but respond to emotionally, changes your ideas.

The recent surge of reactionary thinking- reflected in the O’Donnell primary win in Delaware–has roots in social networking and in anti-intellectualism. Karl Rove may not like what’s happening in his party, but it’s clearly a descendant of his…

Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, told a story about how social networking can benefit a cultural institution. The museum posted some images from its collection on The Commons, a space on the photo-sharing site Flickr dedicated to public photo collections. Not much happened at first, she said, and the museum was about to abandon the experiment until a group of devoted Flickr users began to make use of the material. One was so taken by the museum’s photos of the 1893 Chicago Exposition that he started adding tags to identify different buildings. Like a good curator or archivist, he even provided sources. “Now we see people who have a real investment in these materials looking at…