Suzanne Braun Levine, former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, writes in The Nation about how the most important news is often the least reported.  She says the most important news in her family is how her 15-year old won’t do his homework, and one of her friend’s most important news stories is his sick mother.

Much ‘real news’ is ostensibly about civic life, which sounds like it should reflect how families function within the community, but most of the stories are bloodless reports about buildings–the Board of Education, City Hall. Bloodless but, perhaps to attract the attention that gray stone doesn’t, brutally confrontational. E.J. Dionne pointed out in Why Americans Hate Politics that the way the media typically report politics–titanic struggles between irreconcilable forces and scandalous behavior by unworthy leaders–only polarizes the issues beyond recognition, and beyond resolution as well.

Here at WMB, we often write in very polarizing ways, but we also try to show more nuance where much of the news doesn’t or can’t.  Levine continues:

A handful of journalists are beginning to rewire the newsgathering process. One is Jeannine Guttman, editor of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald. When she realized that her paper was covering news only if it was ‘novel, unusual, or counterintuitive,’ she changed the ground rules. She began assigning reports from what she called ‘third places’–the supermarket, the playground, the coffee shop–where people hang out and talk about things. Then she required that political stories include citizens among the ‘active players,’ along with lobbyists, lawmakers, spin doctors, pollsters, experts, and analysts. And she required that stories about controversial issues include quotes from people who are undecided or ambivalent as well as those who firmly support one side or the other.

Read the article to find out what kind of stories she’s talking about and how it might change the news and the way we read the news.

Over at Utne Reader, I came across an interesting title: “A Guide to Reusing, Swapping, or Giving Away Just About Everything.”  Now that’s an environmentally responsible article I’d like to read.  So I did.  I learned that I could trade unwanted books, music, movies, and video games at Swaptree, Zunafish, and BarterBee.  Trade books at BookMooch and PaperBackSwap.  Trade clothes at Swapstyle.com.  Trade kids’ stuff at Zwaggle.  Give your stuff to charities and nonprofits at Throwplace.  There are more charity giveaway sites, and sites for computers and electronics.  Check it out.

Inspired by a similar game in a David Lodge novel, some writers at New York magazine recently played “Humiliation,” where you sit around in a circle and admit what classic novel or movie you’ve never seen.  Some films they admitted never having seen were E.T., Schindler’s List, Gone With the Wind, and Citizen Kane.  So what about you?  What great films have you never seen?  I must admit, I’ve never seen a Hitchcock film in its entirety.  I saw the first ten minutes of the first two Pirates of the Caribbean films and found them terrific bores.  I’ve never seen a film with Marilyn Monroe.  Admitting such is not necessarily a humiliation, but films do make the fabric of much of our national cultural mythos, and so it’s interesting to hear what stories haven’t shaped our experiences and imaginations.

“Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell” by John Milton

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough’d,

And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast rear’d God’s trophies, and his work pursu’d,
While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbru’d,
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester’s laureate wreath; yet much remains
To conquer still: peace hath her victories
No less renown’d than war. New foes arise

Threat’ning to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free Conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

John Milton is 400 years old this year, eternally speaking, and Stanley Fish writes about why Milton is such a superior poet.  It is important to note, while reading Fish’s encomium, that Milton was a Puritan.

Rather than being employed for its own sake, [Milton’s] poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes - judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Of course, the quality of his work transcended merely Puritan concerns, which is what makes it so lasting, and some to which all Christian writers should aspire.  You can read some of his poems here, and I’ll post one in just a few minutes.

We post a lot about food, foodies, and the culture of food growing, so I also want to post this funny short essay from The New Yorker: “Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers.”  Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Top thick slices of country bread with fresh goat cheese. Sprinkle with herbs and bake until crusty; serve to everyone but Jeff.”
• “Vegetarian friends? Try veggie rumaki: wrap a strip of imitation bacon around a water chestnut, spear with a toothpick, and broil-but instead of imitation bacon use real bacon, and instead of a water chestnut use veal.”
• “Steal Cheryl’s famous potato-salad recipe. When Cheryl asks, ‘Why did you steal my recipe?,’ say, ‘I don’t know, Cheryl, why did you break my heart?’ Then laugh so she knows you’re just kidding.

You just can’t have too many good recipes.

What do the men on the following list have in common:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Nicolaus Copernicus
Rene Descartes
Edward Gibbon
Horace
Soren Kierkegaard
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
George Santayana
Adam Smith
Leonardo da Vinci
St. Paul

Two things, really.  First, they are some of the great minds and talents of Western Civilization.  Second, they were all bachelors.  In this piece in The New English Review, Christopher Orlet considers the benefits of bachelorhood.  Marriage has its champions, but not all were meant for it.  And I’ve known many good men who have been called to a life of celibacy (not that all bachelors are celibates, by any stretch).

Some years ago a noted Japanese researcher analyzed the biographical data of some 280 famous mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists and discovered that all peaked professionally in their twenties, at which point their careers spiraled downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in productivity. However, those who never married remained highly productive well into their fifties. “Scientists tend to ‘desist’ from scientific research upon marriage,” the researcher told an interviewer, “just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.” One theory suggests married men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard (i.e., to attract females). Though it likely they similarly lack the prerequisite time and solitude.

I might qualify Orlet’s statement to say that married men don’t suffer a decline in productivity.  They just produce other things that are more commonplace: babies, families, other kinds of work.  But I can testify: my most productive years of writing - at least regarding quantity - were in my twenties, in graduate school, when I was without wife or child.  I worked 18 hour days, mostly writing and reading and talking about both.  Those were halcyon days.  I still write now, but in far less quantity and hopefully far more quality.  Nevertheless, I am productive.  I have the human beings to show for it.

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has just written a book that bemoans the condition of the young people in America called The Dumbest Generation, in mock homage, I suspect, to Brokaw’s book of a similar title. The problem, says Bauerlein, isn’t just the internet. It’s also the glorification of youth culture since the sixties, which – as Flannery O’Connor would say – put the bottom rail on top.

The glorification of youth was strongly reinforced by “progressive” educational theories emanating from our leading schools of education – theories insisting that the proper role for teachers is to act simply as “facilitators” who guide students in “constructing their own knowledge.” Supposedly, active young minds would do that if they were free to follow their own natural inclinations.

That theory took hold first in the lower K-12 grades and rapidly spread upward. Many college professors resisted it and continued to assign challenging reading material, only to discover that students either wouldn’t read it or if they tried, just couldn’t grasp it. As a result, professors have widely lowered their standards to accommodate the a-literacy of their students. In turn, that means that our supposedly highly educated populace actually contains a small and declining number of people capable of functioning at a high intellectual level.

Based on the review at The Pope Center, Bauerlein’s book isn’t your typical Kids-These-Days book. It’s a solid, reasonable, balanced assessment of why kids don’t really care to learn much these days and who’s to blame for it. All of us, in some way or another. The teachers who refuse to work hard at keeping high standards. The parents who complain when Johnny gets a bad grade because one teacher did have high standards. The school administrators who crave high admission rather than high thinking. The citizenry who mock intellectualism as elitist. And on and on.

Everybody, inside and outside the academy, seems to acknowledge the fact that college students and graduates cannot write very well.  The problem here is not just that they’ve spent anywhere between $50,000 and $200,000 to learn how to do it, among other things.  The other problem is that almost all of us have to write in our work, and when our writing is bad, we look like idiots.  We have to write emails, we write presentations, we write memos and handouts for meetings, we write résumés, we write cover letters, we write proposals, we write letters to colleagues.  A few spelling or grammatical errors can be forgiven - its for it’s, for example - but the truth is, and I always tell my writing students this: when you make a spelling or grammar mistake that your reader usually doesn’t make, your reader will consider himself more intelligent than you.  This doesn’t help your reputation at work.  And when you make a style or composition mistake - e.g., incomprehensible transitions, an abrupt conclusion, forgetting to state your point as early as possible - your reader just walks away thinking you don’t make sense, or don’t make it very well. So, as a group, students and graduates can’t write, but they need to.  William Major, an English professor, says much of the blame really does fall with English professors.  Because as a group, they idolize the teaching of literary theory and laugh at the teaching of writing.  They make all the graduate students and part-timers do it.

The English professor rarely teaches freshman writing courses because it is beneath her to have to worry over catchy introductions, pithy thesis statements, and thoughtful conclusions. Certainly she cannot be bothered by grammar and form, except briefly and in passing. There is a workman-like quality to the teaching of writing; it is as close to blue-collar as you can get in the liberal arts classroom. In my first tenure-track job at a community college I taught a five and five load, four of which were composition classes (far too many, to be sure). I felt like Lucy in the candy factory. We’re English professors; why work up a sweat?

Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences and English professor at the University of Chicago, insisted on teaching freshman writing courses.  Would that all lauded professors would stoop so low.  Maybe America’s college students would appreciate writing if they could tell that their most talented professors did, too.

We’ve blogged before about Berea College, a school that “accepts only applicants from low-income families” and doesn’t charge a dime of tuition.  Of course, they have a $1.1 billion endowment, “which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest.” 

But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

That’s the kind of school I like, a place where literary theory can’t soar to ridiculous places on waxen wings because those wings are dirty from shoveling manure.  Because it charges no tuition, Berea gets much of its income from - ta-da! - its endowment.  And with endowments between $16 and $35 billion, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford ought to take notice.

With its hilly campus, Georgian president’s mansion and old brick buildings, Berea looks much like any elite New England college. But its operating budget is less than half that of Amherst, which has a $1.7 billion endowment and about 100 more students. Faculty pay is much lower, and the student-faculty ratio higher […] To satisfy the work requirement, some students have jobs in the academic departments, administrative offices and labs, while others are assigned to the college farm, the workshops that make and sell traditional mountain crafts (its handmade brooms, especially, are well-known treasures) or the college-owned hotel, which anchors the town square.

Sounds a little like the College of the Ozarks, another school with a similar work requirement and a much smaller, more realistic budget.