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Got this today from a fellow filthy hack who is wasting away at one of the world’s leading business magazines and apparently didn’t have a deadline to meet today. Much love, my underutilized comrade.

It’s a paper about Walt Whitman and you must see it to believe it. It’s so obnoxious that it comes all the way around to being brilliant. It’s so good, in fact, that I suspect it might be a hoax. Years ago, in a previous lifetime, I had the very bad luck to be teaching Whitman to undergraduates at the University of Toledo, in Ohio. Their reaction to Walt was pretty much the same as the one expressed in the high school paper above, though not as clever. One guy got hung up on the notion that Whitman was gay, and therefore refused to discuss the work and made a point of asking me, at the end of class, whether he needed to keep the poems for any reason, and when I told him no, he made a big point of tossing the poems into the trash in front of me. That was depressing enough, but the truly depressing part wasn’t that my “students” (I use the term very loosely) didn’t appreciate Whitman. The truly depressing part was that many of them, nearly all of them, could not comprehend Whitman. And I don’t mean they didn’t understand the imagery. I mean they could not read the sentences and parse them for meaning. They could not understand, from line to line, what was going on in a poem. These students had graduated from high school and were attending university. It was terrifying. Worse yet, they were obstinate about their ignorance, determined to cling to it, resistant to any attempts to help them understand how to read sentences in their own native language. In short, they liked being ignorant. They were proud of it. Ever since then, whenever I hear people talk about “making college education available to everyone,” I cringe. By the time I got to Toledo I’d been teaching for a few years, as an adjunct lecturer, mostly at University of Michigan. Every year I would schlep to the MLA and interview for full-time jobs. But then I took that  one-semester gig at Toledo, and when it was over, I never taught again. Ever.

My latest Newsweek column is here.

Say a prayer. Wish him well. Honor the place where his soul and yours become one. Namaste.

This creepy old dame had her world-record fingernails broken off in a car crash. See the BBC report on it here. I don’t know where to begin.

My latest from Newsweek is here. Money quote: “While blogs can do many wonderful things, generating huge amounts of money isn’t one of them.”

I forgot to post a link here on the blog when the article went up on Newsweek.com. My take on how the media helped Apple cover up for Steve Jobs and his health problems is here.

My article on this, from the latest Newsweek, is here. HP, the biggest tech company, is ringing an alarm bell about the future of science and technology. It’s scary stuff. We’re already starving science and engineering students of funding. That may only get worse if we spend billions bailing out banks and automakers. Money quote: 

Nobody at HP wants to come out and say we should let automakers die. But it must gall them to see bright, aspiring scientists starved of funding while Detroit gets rewarded for its stupidity.

Geeks are raving about Palm’s new Pre phone and Linux-based Web OS, which is looking like the hit of the show.  I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at the device last month and my write-up on it for Newsweek is here. The Pre is a slick looking slider phone with an OS that leapfrogs the competition and features that iPhone users have been craving. Some specs from my Newsweek piece:

The phone has 8 gigabytes of storage, which is decent but not great; it can run Adobe Flash, and can cut, copy and paste, which iPhone can’t; it supports multimedia messaging service (MMS) so you can send text messages with photos attached, which iPhone can’t do; it has a 3 megapixel camera and a flash, which iPhone lacks. There’s a button that lets you buy music from Amazon’s download store. Then there’s the multitasking. Want to talk on the speakerphone while browsing the Web and entering stuff in your calendar? No problem. Palm expects people will keep 15 to 20 applications open at the same time.