Two big topics today, one about why be educated and what education is supposed to amount to--about strategy, in some sense; and then, second, about how education may proceed--about the tactics, as...

In case you need some divertissements to distract you from the abyss this evening:

Did Susan Sontag ghostwrite Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of a Moralist?  Whatever you think of that...

Here's a cheerful piece, on the implications of US power being increasingly military since 2001, and even since the end of the Cold War:

"Looking at the overall use of U.S. armed force abroad...

Your Saturday basket:

A piece about Mosul, a very ancient city and a home for a millennium to Muslims, Christians Jews and many more peoples and ways of life.  An ancient city, much of it...

I have come to appreciate David Runciman as a thinker and writer (his book The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present is really good), but even moreso as a...

I've found an interesting set of reflections on the besetting problem of epistemic polarization in our culture, one that makes a nice analytic distinction between "epistemic bubbles" and "echo...

If so, turn around three times and spit.  Just kidding!

Here is a nice account of "socialism" and what it means.  It's from the Brookings Institute, which is as establishment as you get-...

More interesting as an example of how studies that proclaim their "scientificity" can be misleading, and how important it is to have safety nets, such as institutions for checking and counter...

Following up on a nice piece on "rules for civility" by the philosopher Amy Olberding of a few weeks ago, here is a little essay by two other scholars distinguishing between two different senses, or...

Small post.

"Despite the recent slowdown, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population in 2018 remained at the previous year’s level of 13.7%—the highest since 1910."

That's one powerful...