A cold and wet day where I am.  Hope you are warm and dry, wherever you are.

Interesting fragments of an analysis of what’s going on in higher ed right now.

This is way cool: a...

The website Lit Hub has a genre of posts they do from time to time, "close readings" of various texts.  Some of them are good, some more meh.  But the texts they choose are always worth reading.  He...

Here where I am, it's rainy.  Outside, I mean.  Where I actually am, is inside a cosy house.  Which as you probably know is one of the best places to be on a cold and rainy day.

In...

An interesting review of two books, Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economists' Hour and Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man, are about the triumph of the economists in public policy, and also latterly...

Do these manuscripts change Buddhist history?  Well to most of us in "the West," NO, because we just don't know very much about Buddhist history.  But maybe we should.  (Here's a brief piece from...

Is Malcolm Gladwell "America’s most important public intellectual"?  That's not a title I would have granted him.  But the author of this piece makes an interesting case for Gladwell being central...

It's stormy and blustery where I am.  How is it where you are?  Still, despite all that, a good day.

First:

"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into...

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...