101 Escapes from Idiocracy

See if you can take with a smile this provocation from Carlin Romano, professor of philosophy and humanities, who laments the waning of reading among American college students.

Our pet bunny, Zhuzhi, died the other day. She was very, very old (close to 10 years and 5 months), and had become weaker and weaker over the previous couple of weeks. We were all very attached to her, and took good care of her until the very end, when she finally stopped breathing. I am also thinking, even if this is a bit narcissistic, that Zhuzhi probably loved us back. And this may have helped her hang in for so long – if this wonderful, at times heart-breaking article, is to be believed.

Mark Edmundson, English professor at the University of Virginia, asked this question of the incoming class of 2015 a few years back. In his article, he gave advice to students on how to acquire a real education, even if the stakes were stacked against them.

This is a review of the movie which gave the name of this blog. It did not achieve Oscar glory, but can definitely make you think – particularly in the context of Donald Trump’s political (or post-political?) triumph.

A fun article on the uses and misuses of literature in business education. Despite some negative examples, good literature could be truly illuminating for those who do not just skate through the default major…

This is a fun article from Harvard Magazine describing the lives of Ivy League superachievers. It reminds me of an older piece by David Brooks, “The Organization Kid.” That title, of course, is a spoof of the 1950s sociological classic, Organization Man.

A few years ago, psychologists Josh Foster and Joan M.Twenge published a book called The Narcissism Epidemic. In this blog post, Twenge says they have done another study “showing that narcissistic traits are increasing even faster than we previously thought.” Some of their colleagues disagree, pointing to other data or methodological flaws in the work of Foster and Twenge. They could be right. But this is precisely the trend Christopher Lasch diagnosed in The Culture of Narcissism. And the outcome Tocqueville, Mill, Webb, Hobhouse and others once feared. One could argue that Foster and Twenge describe a mostly American cultural tendency. Tocqueville once felt, however, that in the United States he could observe the future shape and character of the whole civilized world. And that could still be the case.