This piece, by Scott McLemee, seems to me by far the best one I've seen on Steiner. Like the author, I found him at first fascinating, and then a bit more tiresome. I think he was the way I...

These are all worth your while, for sure.

Jill Lepore on the last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once.

Nice introduction to a collection of...

This piece, on UVA researchers, has me thinking.  I know a number of these people.  They're great people.  I think in their fields, they are indeed excellent researchers.  Every one of them deserves...

A nice interview with Lorraine Daston on her career as a scholar who historicizes the self-evident.  

This is a bit worrying: "The World Bank has just warned us that a fourth...

Small piece on a large topic: Are algorithms fracturing our once-unified culture, leaving us in an archipelago of incommensurabilities, or are they ruthlessly feeding our already-diverse...

I have been reading the selected letters of Lionel Trilling, entitled Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. I like to read collections of letters, because they seem to me and...

Where I am, it's grey.  That's my outer weather.  Not so much my inner weather.  That's predictably more complicated.  But these links are here for you, whatever the weather, inside and out:

Two pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education ask a question which I've been wondering about as well--how much is the disinvestment in public higher education part of a larger disinvestment on the...

This piece is a bit light, and seems ot think that it's discovered something that is news to most academics (the "is becoming" in the first sentence below is a few decdes belated), but I think that...

This piece is a bit glib, and a bit too free and easy, but it makes a useful point.  So consider this slight blog post a hat tip to the somewhat weak gesture it makes. That's why my thoughts here...