Here is this week’s print column, dated March 11, 2010, from The Alliance Review:

Accepting criticism is hard.

Although we hate to hear negatives about ourselves, we love it when it’s directed toward somebody else, which might account for the success of “American Idol.” Season after season, smart-aleck, linguistically challenged judges offer criticism that is equal parts scathing, inane and point-on.

Maybe criticism would be easier to take if everyday situations were evaluated in the styles of Randy Jackson, Simon Cowell, Kara DioGuardi, and this season’s newbie judge, Ellen DeGeneres.

To wit, I offer the following everyday situations, “American Idol” style.

A bad job evaluation:

Randy: Yo, dawg, you know I’m a fan, but that was not good. Not good. You didn’t get the TPS reports done, dawg. I wasn’t feelin’ it, dawg.

Simon: If your job were an Olympic event, then your handling of customer complaints would be the equivalent of synchronized swimming while wearing concrete shoes. Utterly, fantastically horrendous.

Kara: What do you think Paula (i.e., Paula Abdul, former “Idol” judge who quit before the current season) would think about your job performance? Then imagine the opposite. That’s what I’d say.

Ellen: I like you. I really, really like you. But the way you come back from lunch late every day, that’s bad — that’s really, really not good. Really. But I like you. I do.
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Fellow teacher Ron Hill and I are teaching a class called Graphic Novels this semester. It’s been satisfying to explore “comic books” with the same level of scrutiny usually reserved for traditional novels and memoirs. One title on the class reading list is Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, a non-fiction account of the author’s father in Nazi-occupied Poland in World War II.

It’s been many years since I first encountered the book, and re-reading it reminds me how revolutionary it is. Spiegelman is not the first to explore serious themes in a so-called “funny book” (Will Eisner did it years before, and even some mainstream superhero comics got into the act in the late ’60s and ’70s), but Spiegelman is a pioneer of using the medium in a sustained way to achieve results distinct from what could be done in a traditional prose memoir.

His use of an extended animal metaphor — Jews in the book are mice, Nazis are cats — just wouldn’t work outside of the visual medium, and his gritty art style perfectly complements the story being told. As much as I like the immediacy of the 1940s sequences (to the extent that anybody can be said to “like” anything as harrowing as the story of a mass genocide), I find the author’s relationship with his father in the present day even more fascinating. It’s a complex relationship these two have (or had), and Spiegelman explores many of the nuances, maddening though they are.

Our students, by and large, appreciated the book. It wasn’t an easy read, like Pride of Baghdad, which we used earlier in the semester, and it wasn’t a lighthearted genre effort like many of the stories in Flight 7, an anthology the students are dipping into now. But Maus wrestles with complex themes and storytelling methods in a way that only the best literature does, and I have to hope it’s a book that will keep gnawing at our students’ minds, perhaps even inviting re-readings at a later date.

This story about a Rhode Island school board’s decision to unilaterally fire its teachers has me concerned, and not solely because so many educators were let go. (The word is that many will be rehired if they agree to be interviewed again for their jobs.)

What bothers me is that Obama’s initial response to the firings is the sort of knee-jerk reaction one might have expected from previous administrations. It stands to reason that not all of the 93 faculty and staff let go were subpar, but rather that they were caught in some kind of tough-love publicity stunt: “Look how serious we are about fixing schools — we’ll fire EVERYBODY.” It’s like a dentist using barbed wire to clean a little tartar from between teeth.

And don’t even get me started on how the federal government’s solution to the public school “problem” is to insist on a) more testing, b) merit pay for teachers, and c) breaking the backs of the teachers’ unions.
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Here is my March 4, 2010, column from The Alliance Review:

When I heard a killer whale at SeaWorld lived up to its name last week, I recalled a line from “Jurassic Park.”

“The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here staggers me,” says Dr. Ian Malcolm, a mathematician specializing in chaos theory. The character is reacting to the cloning and mass merchandising of dinosaurs in the film version of Michael Crichton’s bestseller, but he might just as easily have been commenting on the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau in Orlando, dragged to her death by a whale named Tilikum, or a follow-up report that killer whale shows resumed at the park only three days after the fatal accident.

“Accident” is the wrong word. It implies an event that nobody could predict, like somebody being struck and killed by lightning on a cloudless, sunny day. When used in conjunction with the death of a person who interacts with 6-ton killing machines confined in a large glass fish bowl, it becomes more an act of deflection, a feat of verbal linguistics to absolve guilty parties from culpability.
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Chew is so high concept, it puts other high-concept books to shame. The gist is this: FDA special agent John Chu picks up psychic impressions from food he eats. Reading Taster’s Choice, which collects issues 1-5, I couldn’t help but think this it is a series designed for Showtime or HBO. Like shows on those networks, it is funny and disturbing in equal parts.

The only food to leave Chu cold, psychically speaking, is beets. Unfortunately for Chu, his diet isn’t confined to them. Instead, he is forced to eat progressively more unappetizing evidence, including severed fingers, parts of a dog, and a few others surprises I won’t ruin here.

If that sounds sickening, it is — but only incidentally. Writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory serve it all up in a lighthearted style (the first issue had me laughing out loud — a rarity) that makes even the nastiest
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Here is my column from Feb. 25, 2010, as published in The Alliance Review:

I’m feeling ADHD today, one random thought colliding with another like water molecules in a boiling pot. Let’s see where it takes me:

“Checklist Manifesto” is a new book by Atul Gawande that defends the lowly to-do list, without which many of us can’t make it through the day. I’m a believer: A list-less day is a listless day, one where very little gets done.

My wife teases me that if she doesn’t make my list, she gets no attention. I shush her and scrawl, “Talk to wife.”

According to the author, a checklist in surgery causes hospitals’ mortality rates to drop, presumably because the last step is always, “Be sure to remove all equipment from patients before sewing them up.”

Which gets me thinking that some jobs aren’t complicated enough to need lists, which gets me thinking about shoveling snow: 1. Insert shovel into drift. 2. Throw snow over shoulder. 3. Repeat as necessary. 4. Don’t overexert.

I’m that weirdest of cats, a person who likes to shovel. While some people yearn for heavy snowfalls to make angels in the yard, I look forward to them because I genuinely like to throw snow the old-fashioned way.
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I’ve been on a classic movie jag of late, having watched Citizen Kane and now Gone with the Wind in a two-week span. I said Citizen Kane is a film that needs no apologies, one that is still startlingly modern (with the exception of a single hokey close-up of Welles that seems to last forever) and can hold its own against anything up for Oscar contention this — or any — year.

I can’t say the same for Gone with the Wind. First of all, it’s a gross romanticizing of slavery, one that would have audiences believe most Southern blacks were happy with their lot on plantations and dreaded the coming of the evil Union army just as much as their white masters. It’s hard not to notice this jarring misappropriation of history once you’ve read Alice Walker’s tremendously entertaining The Same River Twice, where she talks about how the power of Hollywood was sufficient, in her youth, to fool her into believing that the problems of one skinny Southern belle (fiddle-dee-dee, it’s Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O’Hara) are somehow of more importance than the enslavement of an entire race.
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The New York Times had an article this weekend about shock-rocker Alice Cooper’s appearances in a series of commercials for Saturn, a German electronics retailer. The commercial above passes an essential test of TV ads: You can tell what’s going on even if you don’t speak the language.

Here is my Feb. 18, 2010, column from The Alliance Review:

My wife is in the spare bedroom, planting rice, strawberries, bell peppers and squash.

She has considered switching to watermelons exclusively, like the farm of a relative she recently visited. She’s fostered this new green thumb in the dead of winter, without once leaving the house or the soft glow of the computer screen.

The name of her agribusiness obsession is “Farmville,” a game associated with the social-networking site Facebook. Visitors to Farmville do everything a regular farmer does, minus the bills, droughts and dirty hands.

My wife is not alone. According to one estimate, 74 million players worldwide have beaten their ploughshares into pixels and joined the Farmville craze.
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This is my One Book One Community review of “Three Cups of Tea,” as published Feb. 13, 2010, in The Review.

“I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us,” says Greg Mortenson. “It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.”

Mortenson has spent most of his adult life giving kids better reasons through the Central Asia Institute (CAI), an organization he co-founded to build schools in places that many Americans only hear of when a roadside bomb explodes or a military operation is staged there.

“Three Cups of Tea,” this year’s One Book One Community selection by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, chronicles Mortenson’s success in bringing education to some of the world’s most impoverished people only after it recounts his biggest failure: An abortive attempt to scale K2, the world’s second highest mountain. Eventually, he finds himself in Korphe, an impoverished Pakistani village that nonetheless offers the climber a place to rest and recover. He is so touched by the inhabitants’ kindness that he promises to build them a school.
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