Month: March 2011
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Forget college
Once in a while, I like to read Bob Herbert because he gets things wrong. But seeing how he gets things wrong helps me to see things more clearly. (One should always give credit where credit is due.) On March 4, he got higher education wrong. Herbert observes that students are not studying, they are…
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‘Where have all the good men gone?’ On making sense of modern life
Yesterday I bumped into my friend Peter Foges at Cafe Regular du Nord and we got to talking about the time in which we’re living. Peter was saying that we’re living through the end of one thing, but we’re not sure what the next thing will be.* The end, occurring somewhere in 2010 or 2011…
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Which comes first: freedom or goodness?
Does the good trump freedom, or is it the other way around? The question is raised, once again, by what the Wall Street Journal on March 3 dubbed a “classroom sex show.” During a class held the week of Feb. 21, a tenured Northwestern University professor, John Michael Bailey, arranged for a married couple to stage…
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Is modern friendship an antidote to crankiness?
In a recent email, my friend Dougald Hine wrote, “[T]he internet has the power to save us [i.e., us life of the minders living outside the academy] from turning into cranks! What I mean by this is that, until very recently, it was hard to pursue an unconventional career* [see footnote below] as a thinker…
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What George Eliot teaches us about growing up
In the Feb. 14 & 21 issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes, The book [George Eliot’s Middlemarch] that Virginia Woolf characterized as ‘one of the few English novels for grown-up people’ is also a book about how to be a grownup person–about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 