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...

Frederick Douglass's "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?" remains the most important speech ever given on July Fourth.  It is worth reading in its entirety, but especially--for people...

Young adult attachment to religion continues to be a really rich area of study, though one that many scholars don't seem to attend to nearly as much as they should.  We've known for some time that...

A somewhat light piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (occasionally they do deeper dives, but sometimes it's more coverage than analysis, as in this case, and that's fine) explores the tensions of...

This worries me in a number of ways.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, American education was really quite advanced, compared to other industrialized nations.  Even today, American higher...