This essay by Randolph Bourne, one of the great public intellectuals of American life, has been on my mind a great deal these past several years, and in the past few days, with our President...

American freedom is deeply related to American slavery, as Edmund Morgan famously noted almost fifty years ago to white people (though African-Americans were well aware of this, long before that)....

For a world very deeply interested in making everything conversible, it's interesting that some things are still quite fraught to discuss.  I am reminded of this by two recent stories.  First, here...

This piece is a bit shallow, and trades on a simplistic understanding of Protestant Mainline decline (there's a really interesting story here waiting to be told), but the final conceit is...

I like cities--the density and intensity of life there makes for fun and interesting things.  You never know who you'll run into, and the odds of what we can call a "cosmopolitan" encounter--an...

This piece is an interesting reflection by Arthur Brooks on aging and what it means to think deliberately about the shape of your own life and how to make the final decades of your life mean...

This article in the New York Times today, about the 1919 Eisenhower auto convoy across the United States, has me thinking.  If I read it correctly, it is suggesting that the infrastructure Ike put...

This is an exceptionally fine piece, explaining the logic of reviewing, by James Wood.  He means it to speak about the logic of his own kind of reviewing, reviewing of literary works, but it seems...

Technological advances in DNA sampling have given a tremendous, if sometimes controversial, boost to early human history.  I find this both deeply intellectually fascinating, and also oddly...

I initially titled this post "political polarization and higher education," but that was not accurate.  The primary phenomenon is not "polarization," the primary phenomenon is the massive...