Gottlob Frege: Like a hedge fund manager, except about the logical foundations of mathematics This past weekend, the New York Times ran an education feature on the recent upswing of college students majoring in philosophy. The Times piece comes on the heels of a similar MSN report several weeks ago, in which a young hedge fund analyst and philosophy BA memorably explained that his work is "like reading Russell, Frege or Wittgenstein, except it's about money." Some of the purported practical benefits of a philosophy education are gaining critical and analytical skills that would be useful in virtually any industry, pursuing the closest thing to a pre-law undergraduate course there is (if nothing else, classes in formal logic ought to pay off on the LSAT), and in at least one case, sexual conquest. ("That whole deep existential torment" philosophers are known for is a major turn on to a 20-year old cog sci major.)

Most of my writing for Jewcy is on politics, but as a former philo major, these really hit a nerve with me. It's quite true, for example, that the tools required for doing philosophy have perhaps a wider practical application than those of any other field --- it used to be that philosophy was the only subject you could study; all the other sciences and humanities are spin-offs --- but that has always been the case, and doesn't explain why more college students are taking philosophy courses and majoring in it now than in the past. There are two more plausible explanations of the surge of interest in philosophy:

(1) Students are increasingly recognizing just how petrified most of the academic humanities have become. If you're at all interested in doing original work, rather than employing decoder rings and worshipping the bones of past masters, stay far, far away from comparative literature.

(2) Students (and presumably, in many cases, their parents) are finally recognizing that the predominant mode of doing philosophy in Anglophone universities has nothing to do with wearing black, chain smoking, and thinking about how everything is a social construct (though you can do that if you want!), but is and has for more than half a century been what's generally called "analytic philosophy" --- a rigorous method of philosophical investigation based on, informed by and constrained by formal logic and theoretical linguistics. Analytic philosophy doesn't resemble any other field very closely, but resembles math more closely than it resembles anything else.

One word of warning, though. No matter what anecdotes you find in New York Times education features, do not go into philosophy thinking it's a path to an incredible sex life. It is not.

Imagination is No Escape: integrates facts into the gameThink a Nintendo game is a good way to teach kids about the Holocaust? A 21-year-old British video game developer does, and the company producing his latest creation hopes to have it ready for distribution in Europe by the end of the year. Luc Bernard's game, Imagination Is the Only Escape, is based on the ways that the Nazis tortured children, and won’t be distributed in the US.

Reactions have been as condemnatory as you’d expect. However, Bernard maintains that he’s not trying to make light of the suffering of children. He promises that there won’t be any on-screen violence, and though Alten8--the company producing the game--originally asked him to remove all swastikas from the game, it subsequently backed off. Bernard says he’s trying to make a game that will be educational and appropriate for young children, and points out that his mother is Jewish and members of his family took care of Jewish orphans after World War II.

So far, the most interesting response has come from the Anti-Defamation League. Instead of lashing out against Bernard and Alten8, Myrna Shinbaum, a spokeswoman for the ADL, is quoted as saying, “We certainly believe that we have to find new ways of teaching lessons of the Holocaust as new technologies are being developed.”

Related: Holocaust Remembrance Project for French Kids Sparks Ire

Jewcy’s comic artist turns his gimlet eye away from the Jewish people and towards their detractors.

As Britian’s former European minister noted in The Washington Post this fall, antisemitism is on the rise in the UK. Jews are four times more likely than Muslims to be attacked because of their religion, according to a widely circulated article in City Journal, and hate crimes against Jews have doubled since 2001.

Below, Eli Valley imagines what happens when this trend hits the schools.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

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I'm in the process of writing a piece examining the Jewish nonprofit world's antidemocratic, intensely insular culture and how it's impacting the larger community. There's still more reporting and research yet to be done, but I wanted to mention one of the organizations that will be in my piece. It's currently in a time-sensitive contest that you can help it win, and it's utterly deserving.

The organization is DonorsChoose.org, which is at the forefront of a galvanic shift in philanthropy, from elitism toward democracy. Donors Choose uses an eBay-like online marketplace to connect teachers directly to donors. If a Bronx middle school teacher needs $300 for, say, the kind of earth science books wealthy children take for granted, she can simply posts her request on the Donors Choose website and anyone with $10 can contribute to helping make that lesson plan a reality.

That’s the kind of philanthropic experience that will force the young to feel called to give, and as a consequence, help bring America’s nonprofit tradition into the next generation. The central idea fueling Donors Choose is so powerful it has the potential to help flatten, democratize, and eliminate those petty nonprofit bureaucratic middlemen from many more philanthropic sectors than education.

Right now, Donors Choose is one of five finalists in an American Express contest that will reward $5 million to a charity selected by AmEx cardholders. Vote now for DonorsChoose.org.

Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox,” an article published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is a shanda fer da goyim, a skewed and distasteful takedown that invites non-Jews to gawk at the internal problems of a modern Orthodox Jewish community. Or maybe it’s a poignant and brave discussion of the challenges of bringing a traditional faith into modern life, written by a man who cherishes his people. Either way, it’s kicked up a storm of impassioned chatter throughout the interweb, where you can find both these judgments and many more.

“Orthodox Paradox” hits on themes close to Jewcy's editorial heart, what with Feldman trying to figure out what a cosmopolitan Jew’s to do with this bewildering, antiquated faith that we just can't seem to leave behind. So we had to pick his brain a bit. Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School who was raised modern Orthodox, agreed to answer my questions via e-mail.

In the hot seat: Noah FeldmanWhy did you write this article?

These are issues I've been thinking about for a long time, and that have recurred again and again in my work on the U.S. and the Muslim world. My thinking on those topics is influenced by my education in the modern Orthodox world, and I came to think that others might be engaged with similar issues.

You were surprised when Maimonides—the yeshiva from which you graduated—removed* you and your (non-Jewish) wife from a photo published in the alumni newsletter. Your surprise struck many readers as rather strange, since the community makes no secret of its rejection of intermarriage. It’s a bit as if you’d pulled out a bag of pork rinds, devoured them with relish throughout the evening, and then expressed bewilderment when someone asked you if you'd set them aside until later. What are your critics missing here?

My classmates are great. As it happens, the reunion was lots of fun and we were all warm towards one another, as one would hope. What is troubling about the view you describe—which I never sensed from my classmates—is its implication that somehow modern Orthodox people should be protected from my living my life as I choose. As if choice of life partner were as trivial as a snack. Going to a reunion is a perfectly normal part of life, and choosing not to attend, in order to shield people from my life, would be absurd. People who are comfortable with their own life choices don't get "offended" when others choose differently.

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Pearl HarborWhen I'm not doing comedy, I make my living as an SAT tutor. A damned good one, if I may say so. Every time I hear about some dumb gimmick for studying the SAT (study on your cellphone, "yo momma" jokes, the SAT shower curtain), I think "Well, that'll work for vocabulary." (It's not, however, likely to teach you to deal with fractional exponents, or any serious comparison of long reading passages).

When Flocabulary came out with a hip-hop vocabulary book and CD, I shrugged. That could work. But when the same people came out with Flocabulary: The Hip-Hop Approach to U.S. History, I bought the book and CD. So I could laugh. Blog and laugh.

I loaded the tracks on my iPod ... and proceeded to have a religious experience. Pedagogically religious, anyway. The music didn't suck. In fact, the first song, about the founding of America, began like this:

Black Male Voice Portraying a European, and Rapping in the Most Drippingly Sarcastic Rapper Voice I Have Ever Heard: Wow, I just discovered America!

Black Male Voice Portraying an Angry Native American Speaking as Though to a Small, Racist Child: You didn't discover it. We were already here.

The song goes on to talk about migration over the Bering Strait, the five "civilized" tribes, and the fact that some Native Americans had slaves ("Indians weren't living on some heaven on earth tip"), and to comment, "Isn't that cheap? They call my Jeep a Jeep Cherokee -- what if they called my Jeep a Jeep Jew?"

In the course of this album, Harriet Tubman gets a Lil Kim-like solo ("Reward for my capture? 40 G's"), Frederick Douglass gets to sound like the incredible badass he was, Carnegie (in "Big Ballin' in the Gilded Age") raps about Social Darwinism while Rockefeller points out that Jay-Z named his company "after me," and Sacajawea guides Lewis and Clark through the Rockies "like Mapquest." Lincoln (whose Emancipation Proclamation, of course, failed to free any actual slaves) is portrayed with a dorky, squeaky white guy voice -- but FDR gets a booming, dignified white guy voice. Perhaps my favorite line is when Sally Hemings first attracts Thomas Jefferson:

She's dressed in yellow. She says "Hello,

You probably noticed me in the fields of Monticello."

Below is a sound clip (a couple verses, so as to say within fair use) from a song called "Would You Drop It?", which presents, I think, a not-bad-at-all explanation of World War II up to Truman's decision to drop the bomb. I challenge anyone to better explain fascism and its appeal to Germans, isolationism, the Great Depression, and Europe's falling to the Germans until Pearl Harbor galvanized us "like 9/11" -- in one minute, in rhyme.

All these tracks are on iTunes (search "Flocabulary"). If I could buy them for every teenager in America, I would.

"Would You Drop It"? (clip)

Enjoy responsiblyHere's one for the annals of infantilization (since it's on my mind): Dartmouth College has decided to ban water pong, on the grounds that drinking too much water can kill you. "Water intoxication" is one of those things we know about only from Reuters "Oddly Enough" items, and I can't imagine anyone who's made it safely to age eighteen needs to sweat it. (As it happens, this weekend is Dartmouth's Winter Carnival. Check the Hanover police blotter on Monday and guess how many of the bicycle thieves, rogue defecators, self-defenestrators, and garden variety blue-faced pukers you find therein were intoxicated by water.) But here it is, ladies and gentleman, your tuition dollars at work:

In an e-mail sent to residents, Deal, the community director for the Choates and North Hall, cited three residential policies that water pong violates, including a policy prohibiting endangering behavior.

In the same e-mail, Deal also included a link to a CNN article titled, "Women drinks so much water she dies," which reported on a California women who died after participating in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" radio contest. Choates cluster residents interviewed said they thought the comparison to the woman in California was unfounded because students did not drink the water when playing.

When asked about the e-mail, Deal said she was looking out for her residents.

"My job is to look out for the health and safety of the residents," she said. "Whether students are drinking the water or not, it is a possible liability if someone was to become intoxicated in water."

My job is . . . there you have it. Just as the proposed iPod ban is about revenue for New York City and not at all about your safety, moronic policies like this one are really about justifying non-positions like "Community Director"—positions that, generally speaking, probably have next to nothing to show for themselves and their salaries at the end of the year. It's too bad self-reliance is getting flushed drop by drop by people who contribute so little to anything.

Old-school textbookReaders familiar with the work of Diane Ravitch will be aware that in the United States, no job demands more attention to detail than "textbook publisher." It falls on this unhappy soul to regulate carefully the children depicted: how many will be white or black, Inuit or Russian, rope-skipping or wheelchair-bound, slender or spherical, and on and on and on. Such lawsuit-minded caution is always good for a laugh, but did you know that publishers in other countries apply no less exacting (albeit quite different) standards? Take Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, where the representation of apes, pigs, jackals, hyenas, and bloodsuckers—and the diverse and marvelous things they teach us!—is paramount:

A Saudi-run school in London uses textbooks which describe Jews as monkeys and Christians as pigs, according to papers filed with an employment tribunal by a former teacher.

Teaching materials used at the King Fahd school in Acton, west London, translated from Arabic for an unfair dismissal claim against the school, say Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan", and invite pupils to "name some repugnant characteristics of Jews" and to give examples of worthless religions, such as Judaism and Christianity.

Colin Cook, 57, a British convert to Islam who taught English at the school for 19 years until he was dismissed last December, said pupils had been heard saying they wanted to kill Americans, that 9/11 was good, and that Osama bin Laden was a hero. He is claiming £100,000 compensation for unfair dismissal, race discrimination and victimisation.

The school was originally set up to educate the children of Arab diplomats, but most of its 750 pupils are now British Muslims. It teaches Wahhabism, the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia, which is an extreme form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Qur'an.

I wasn’t alive for Woodstock.

 I wasn’t around during the Stonewall Riots.

To me, Nixon is an angry guy with a big nose in a jar on Futurama.

I do know all about the day Lincoln was shot. But of course, there was a movie about that.