The ongoing media concentration on cases of domestic abuse perpetrated by NFL players against their spouses and children has, for the moment, pushed the issue of sexual assaults on our college campuses largely to the margins of our national attention. Our ability to solve problems seems to be diminishing in proportion to the ability—or willingness–of…
I came across a CNBC article on trends in business education. At first, I misread the article’s title and mistakenly thought that someone was proposing a 25-year MBA program. That seemed to me, of course, a shocking inversion of the current trends, one which would give a whole new meaning to the phrase the “career…
Developers have been surrounding Chinese largest cities with upscale suburbs modeled on the major cities of Europe and North America. Not all of these “themed” developments have been equally successful, but they have attracted international media attention, especially in those nations whose urban landmarks have been replicated. Bianca Bosker has just contributed an article to…
The following is the opening of an article that Nicholas Carlson has written for Business Week, in which he explains how he used Evernote to write a 90,000+-word book called Marissa Meyer and the Fight to Save Yahoo. I am not necessarily promoting the use of this particular software, but I think that the slideshow…
In 2013, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documented the banning of 307 books in locations across the United States. The ten most frequently banned books of 2013 were the following: Captain Underpants (Series), by Dav Pilkey. Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited for age group, violence. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison.…
Chad Taylor, the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in Kansas currently held by the long-serving but vulnerable Republican Senator Pat Roberts, recently announced that he was withdrawing from the race. The move was widely seen as an attempt to improve the chances of the Independent candidate Greg Orman, who was consistently finishing ahead of…
On this past Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” show, John Oliver devoted about two thirds of the show to an extended riff on the student-debt issue. At one point, he compared taking on student debt to getting a sexually transmitted disease: “Essentially, student debt is like HPV. If you go to college, you’re almost certainly going…
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964. Thomas Berger had such a long and productive career that it is a mystery why he is not routinely included in discussions of the great American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. One of the highlights of his career was the critical…
Over the last several weeks, Purdue University has announced that its School of Communications and its College of Technology have received $500,000 grants from President Mitch Daniels for creating, respectively, a three-year baccalaureate program and a competency-based program. In the media coverage, there has been a great deal of positive spin on the possibilities opened…