It’s hard to read the old-fashioned way, slowly and deliberately. Few of us have the patience, the concentration, or the time. When we do read, we skim, trying to get a quick “take” on the topics of the day, often conveniently served up as prepackaged excerpts by our modern media machine. We flit from one thing […]

In “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” William Deresiewicz lambasts a pitiful American elite education system that “manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.” The entire system of elite education, he argues, reproduces […]

The New Republic does not like the digital humanities. Following Leon Wieseltier’s earlier diatribes, Adam Kirsch recently warned that the digital humanities and their “technology” were taking over English departments. Kirsch posed some reasonable questions: Are the digital humanities a form of technological solutionism? No, not withstanding the occasionally utopian strand. Are the digital humanities “post-verbal”? With all their graphs, […]

There’s a new genre taking shape on blogs, Twitter, and even in the pages of The London Review of Books: Quit Lit. Just last week, Mariana Warner, a creative writing professor and member of the Man Booker prize committee, explained her decision to resign her position at the University of Essex. In “Why I Quit,” she describes the bureaucratic disciplines of […]

Recently, a broad literature has chronicled, diagnosed, and attempted to solve what many have referred to as a “crisis” in higher education. Some authors tie the purported crisis to an out-of-touch faculty or lackadaisical students, while others blame a conservative or liberal political culture or the public’s general distrust of universities. [For the full article, […]

LAST YEAR THE ECONOMIST PUBLISHED A special report not on the global financial crisis or the polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Article after article cited one big number after another to bolster the claim that we live in an age of information super- abundance. The data are impressive: […]

This past summer, two Cornell University scholars and a researcher from Facebook’s Data Science unit published a paper on what they termed “emotional contagion.” They claimed to show that Facebook’s news feed algorithm, the complex set of instructions that determines what shows up where in a news feed, could influence users’ emotional states. Using a massive data set […]