I was thinking about the issue of time this past week, while doing what I call cross-reading: reading items online and pausing every few minutes to look something up on a web browser and then returning to the original reading. This is a high-stimulation way of reading, producing an ultrathin layer of information about many […]
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“Beach Books 2014-2016,” released yesterday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), is a study of mostly summer reading assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshman. NAS reports: Our study of common readings during the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 covers 377 assignments at 366 colleges and universities for the first year and […]
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This morning in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes summed up one condition of the Republican Party: “What’s their problem? In Senate races, it’s bad candidates: old hacks (Wisconsin), young hacks (Florida), youngsters (Ohio), Tea Party types who can’t talk about abortion sensibly (Missouri, Indiana), retreads (Virginia), lousy campaigners (North Dakota) and Washington veterans (Michigan). Losers […]
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There may be something to demand-side economics: According to the most recent annual report from the National Science Foundation, the number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in the humanities dropped by almost 5 percent from 2006 to 2007. As Inside Higher Education reported, the decline—steepest for doctorates in literary studies such as English, foreign languages, and […]
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Robert George and Cornel West have teamed up in an unlikely enterprise – co-teaching a Freshmen Seminar, “Great Books and Arguments” at Princeton. You can find the full story in the June issue of the Princeton Alumni magazine. George and West seem to radiate enthusiasm about the collaboration, and, particularly, about the challenges to their […]
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