In the spirit of Halloween, mischief its obligatory companion, it is only suitable to note the labyrinthine ways of parking instructions on college campuses all across America. In honor of one of the colleges from which I graduated, I will use it as an exemplar. I am certain many of you have your own spooky…
The following chart is taken from a new report by the Pew Research Center, measuring public trust, by political ideology, in various media outlets. The takeaways from this survey are fairly obvious from the chart. On the whole, UK-based news sources are trusted by a broader range of Americans than U.S. news sources. Those who…
In Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that the “elite” ought to get out more. He has no quarrel with the idea or efficacy of an elite, he simply believes that its members in contemporary America have too little experience of the rest of the world. One of his acolytes,…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has released its annual ranking of American colleges and universities. The ranking purport to reflect what students will learn at the institutions: specifically, whether they will be required to take core courses in composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics, and science. An article in the…
It is not the toothless grin of the jack-o’-lantern, a name that will give even the most fastidious punctuators among us a shiver with its strange hyphen and accent mark combination, that scares me. Nor is it the light of a candle that illuminates just how far we have come from traditions of centuries ago…
This month’s issue of Washington Monthly includes a thoughtful article by Ben Miller in which he attempts to compile such rankings and, in fact, provides several alternative lists of the twenty worst colleges and universities in the U.S. For analyses of the rankings, see the full article, which is available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/americas_worst_colleges051752.php?page=all. Most of the…
Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Harper, 1912. Trained as a dentist, Grey had a practice in New York City from 1896 to 1904. But in 1907, he fulfilled a lifetime obsession and began a decade of travels throughout the American West. He used these experiences to lend immediacy to the…
The US Olympic Committee has selected Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Boston as finalists for the US bid for the 2024 Olympics, with a decision announced in 2017. While the pundits have already had their field day in the local press, the vast overruns that defined Sochi suggest that developed global cities with significant…
The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll. At the same time,…
In what may hopefully be a small sign that the tide could be turning against a corporate-funded K-12 school “reform” movement that thrives on autocratic administration and the denigration of veteran teachers, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has resigned at the request of the school board, The New York Times reports today. …