I've got a big backlog so I'll try to get one of these up every day this week.  

A fascinating idea: the four-day workweek.  Long predicted, but it never quite arrives.  A nice article discussing what it might look like, how it would help businesses and employees, and why it's unlikely.

My old friend Jonathan Malesic pointed me to this piece.  It's about the need to have a social media presence as part  of your vocation as a writer.  It's interesting and insightful, but I simply cannot believe this paragraph:

Those who insist that the job of the writer is simply, only, to write are deluding themselves. Editors whose advice is to get off Twitter, put your head down, and do the work are missing something fundamental and indispensable about digital media. It’s that all the things that invite derision for influencers — self-promotion, fishing for likes, posting about the minutiae of your life for relatability points — are also integral to the career of a writer online. At least if you want to be visited by that holy trinity when it comes time for your book launch, you must be an influencer in all the ways that matter. 

Again, maybe it's just me--I am in a far different position than free-lancing journalists and writers.  But I think this is deeply mistaken.

A pretty solid review of a book by a colleague here at UVA, on the design and intended functioning of our common University of Virginia.  "The establishment of the University of Virginia, Taylor concludes, abounds in ironies. Because Jefferson lavished state funds on architecture, tuition was so high it prevented any but sons of the wealthy from attending. Enslaved people built the institution, making and laying bricks, cutting and hauling stones. Eventually, enrollments grew, students practiced temperance and self-discipline and dialed down the violence and aggressive individualism by adopting the Christian faith that Jefferson distrusted. And graduates of the University of Virginia defended the Confederacy they loved."

Another review of this book, by Drew Faust, ex-President of Harvard University:

to demonstrate how U-Va. was from its very conception shaped and distorted by slavery, by the habits of mind and behavior slavery necessitated, by the social structures and values it yielded, by the moral compromises it required. “Slavery dominated that society,” Taylor writes, “affecting everyone and every institution."  It failed to produce the world Jefferson hoped it would, Taylor writes:

"Violent student riots in October 1825, just months after the university opened, brought Jefferson to tears. Drinking, fighting, tormenting faculty members, and abusing and assaulting enslaved workers seem to have been regular pastimes for these aspiring masters of the universe. Their attitudes and actions, Taylor argues, were direct products of the code of honor that defined their elite social and racial standing. The habit of command was essential to those who would be entrusted with exerting and maintaining control in their slave society. Here again the requisites of slavery were undermining Jefferson’s goals for his university. Ironically and tragically, the institution of slavery Jefferson both condemned and tolerated would subvert his dream of educating a new generation of statesmen ready and able to accomplish what he could not"

From this, Faust draws a significant conclusion: "We have too readily, he argues, adopted the “Jeffersonian conceit of seeking reform on the cheap by redesigning education for the coming generation.” Taylor would have us recognize that we, not our children or grandchildren, bear responsibility for our world."

Really great piece by my friend and co-conspirator Slavica Jakelic. "For anyone opposed to nationalism as a matter of theological and moral principle, or focused on the immediate context in which Leo’s encyclical was written, it is easy to emphasize—as some American Catholic interpreters do—its instruction that Christians must discern when to resist the powers of worldly political communities and the institutions that embody them. Yet Leo assesses the role of Christians not only as citizens of the state, but also as individuals constituted by—and enacting—love for their country. In distinguishing between obedience and love, state and country, and calling for the evaluation of such dispositions within the postulates of faith, Leo points out that the Christian response to the modern world should not be a matter of rejecting it a priori, but of thoughtfully and responsibly engaging it. He reminds us, to paraphrase here the contemporary German social thinker Hans Joas, that religious traditions do nothing on their own, but become alive only when they are interpreted and enacted in particular times, in the individual and social lives of those who inhabit them."

Enjoy!  And stay warm this week--in the Midwest and East of the US, it's going to get cccccooooollllld.