Utopias Lost
Anthropology | One searches in vain to find a state of pacifism in nature, an anthropologist writes -- not that famous researchers haven't tried. Margaret Mead's idyllic Samoan tribes were later...
View ArticleMove Over, Sartre
Ivory Tower | France's "most fêted thinker" is not Bernard-Henri Lévy but 36-year-old Esther Duflo, an article says. And you're not likely to find her in a smoke-filled brasserie on the Left Bank. She...
View ArticleHistory in the Dustbin
Ivory Tower | Are those who learn the lessons of history condemned to repeat visits to the unemployment line? Perhaps, to judge from an article on bleak job prospects for historians -- not just because...
View ArticleThe Doctorate Is Out
Ivory Tower | Wait, isn't higher education supposed to be the ticket to higher earnings? Not if you have a Ph.D. in the humanities, an article says. "By all indications, recent university hiring...
View ArticleIvy League of Their Own
Ivory Tower | How the differences between the Harvard and Yale law schools help explain the differences between Obama and Bill Clinton in governing approach: "Harvard prided itself on instilling...
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Food and Man at Oxford
Ivory Tower | When scholars cogitate about food at the Oxford Food Symposium, you get people wearing edible hats, seminars on sheep fat, and reflections on why plums taste sweet to the Italians, but...
View ArticleExpelling College Grades
Ivory Tower | Academics often talk of getting rid of grades in college, to little avail. But an article says the idea is getting some traction over rising dissatisfaction with grade inflation and other...
View ArticleHow TV Grew Up and Became Bookish
Television | If TV's supposedly so bad, why is there an explosion of all manner of scholarly books on "Battlestar Galactica," "The Sopranos" and more? Because "the medium has grown up and its fans have...
View ArticleThe ‘Your Name Here’ Law of Bluster
Ivory Tower | You crave immortality, but you're a tad short on funds just now to buy the name of that building. What's an ego to do? Why, conjure up your own academic theorem! But beware Stigler's Law...
View ArticleDebt, Deflation and a Guy Named Irving
Economy | Uh-oh, the American economist who two weeks before the Crash of '29 declared that stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau” is now back in vogue. Yes, Irving Fisher -- contemporary of...
View ArticleThe Da Vinci Code of Leaving Things Undone
>Ivory Tower | Procrastination may be the mark of a master, an essay says. Only "a complete captive of the modern cult of productive mediocrity that pervades the workplace" could fault Leonardo da...
View ArticleBribe U.
Ivory Tower | Moolah, moolah! With college endowments hard up for donors, it's a great year to bribe your kid's way into a top school, an article says, anonymously quoting a variety of college...
View ArticlePutting the Thoreau in ‘Doh!’
Television | Lisa of "The Simpsons" exhibits "attitudes that bear strong resemblance to Thoreauvian individualism," a German academic writes. "The 8-year old displays a non-conformist lifestyle, a...
View ArticleThe Web’s ‘Black Hole’ of Historical Memory
Internet | "At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House Web site" and that's a bad thing, writes the head of the British Library. Online...
View ArticleCrime and Bafflement
Crime | A Penn professor and poverty expert serves as a juror in a Philadelphia murder trial and finds "there is an abstraction in most of the literature and in most of what I have written." The trial...
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