Lydia Wilson — Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing

This essay is from the online science magazine, Nautilus.  Here's a link to the original.   Reading is a very recent development in world history (no more than 5,000 year old) and its distinctive to humans.  The original impulse to write things down seemed to come from accounting, maintaining a record of transactions, and them moved …

Craig Brown – Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret

Here's a challenge to any writer.  How do you write a book about someone famous who never did anything?  Craig Brown found an answer with his book, Nine-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.   In this book, he provides not a biography but a set of impressions of Queen Elizabeth's younger sister as they were recounted by …

Jennifer Senior: 95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us.

This post is a piece by New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior, which was published on December 21.  Here's a link to the original. It builds on the argument that Michael Sandel made in The Tyranny of Merit and nicely illuminates some of the issues I've been raising in this blog about the problems of …

Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling

This post is a piece I just wrote, which will end up as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School.  It will be published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of Bill Reese and John Rury series on Historical Studies in Education.  Here is a link …

Cartoons about the Life of a Doctoral Student

This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about the Life as a Doctoral Student.  All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper.  The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech.  Earlier I posted cartoons …

Thomas Edsall: The Resentment that Never Sleeps

This post is a piece by Thomas Edsall published in the New York Times last week.  It explores in detail the recent literature about the role that declining social status has played in the rise of right-wing populism in the US and elsewhere.  Here's a link to the original. The argument is one that resonates …

“The Crown” and the Long Tradition of Petitioning the Monarch for Redress of Grievances

In episode 5 of The Crown's season 4, a desperate out-of-work painter named Michael Fagan breaks into Buckingham Palace, enters the queen's bedroom, sits on the foot of her bed, and asks her for a cigarette.  "Filthy habit," she replies. "Yes, I know, I'm trying to quit," he says.  Then he gets down to business, …

Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research

This post is a short piece I wrote in 2011 for a special issue of the journal Teacher Education and Practice on "Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship." My one take is that research in education is not necessarily well positioned to enhance education; on the contrary, it often does more harm than good.  See …

Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and Its Discontents

This post is an essay by political scientist Francis Fukuyama about the challenges facing liberal democracy today from populisms of the left and right.  The original appeared in the on-line journal, American Purpose, which he helped found.   A large number of essays have emerged in recent years worrying about the future of liberal democracy, but …