An interview with United Faculty for the Common Good ROTUA LUMBANTOBING, GABRIEL WINANT, TODD WOLFSON IN THE PROMISING EARLY DAYS of the Biden Administration, there occurred a moment—brief and soon forgotten—when it seemed like we might have a chance to repair the trainwreck of the higher-ed economy. During the debate on the omnibus social and domestic… Read More Do Much More to Meet This Moment
NB: Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a novella about the life of a school teacher, Mr. Chipping, written by English writer James Hilton, and published in 1934. I think it must be among the most beautiful love stories ever told. It also reminds us of the tremendous power of the human soul. My father took me… Read More Goodbye Mr Chips
NB: What is happening to Indian education is nothing short of organised crime. My heartfelt sympathy is due to the young people who are forced face so much tension and travail for absolutely no fault of theirs. It is not surprising that lacs of Indian students do their best, at great expense, to get educated… Read More Methodical destruction of the education system
The move away from true hands-on scholarship feels truly tragic Lisa Lieberman t was getting toward the end of this recent semester, and I was at a loss. Either one of two things was happening: My freshman-composition students’ writing had gotten mysteriously, miraculously, markedly better over the semester compared with previous ones, or a large minority… Read More AI and the death of student writing
Journalist Maria Ressa named Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in speech at Hay literary festival in Powys Lucy Knight “Tech bros” such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are “the largest dictators”, Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 for her defence of media freedom, has said. The American-Filipina journalist has spent a number… Read More Social media bosses are ‘the largest dictators’, says Nobel peace prize winner
I am appalled by today’s sensitivities—how easily people take offense. It impels me to be offensive, or at least to ignore the shrinking violets. George Salis: Your latest book is Burma Sahib, a novel about a young Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) in India. What attracted you to this part of Blair’s life? Paul Theroux: A line in… Read More The Grit That Makes the Pearl: An Interview With Paul Theroux
NB: There’s no wonder why lacs of Indian students are migrating to campuses abroad to pursue higher studies (800,000 in 2022 alone). The Headquarters of Truth based in Nagpur have taken over most public universities. At this rate, nothing will be left for Indian teachers to do except praise whatever the RSS considers to be… Read More Professor’s Harassment by ABVP Shows Near-Complete Takeover of Universities by RSS-BJP
From the 1910s through the 1930s, Maximilian J. Rudwin produced some excellent pioneering scholarship on the European traditions of the fantastic in literature, especially as related to various manifestations of the devil. Rudwin was an unusually peripatetic scholar, and virtually nothing has been written about him or his oeuvre. His trail has not been easy to… Read More Manifestations of the Devil: The writings of Maximilian Rudwin (1885-1946)
NB: This is a fascinating account of one of the most deadly confrontations of modern times. I learned from it that Ayatollah Khomeini was less interested in religious orthodoxy than in seizing absolute power and cutting down moderate clerics to size, and used the book to assert his authority; that Rushdie’s assailant Hadi Matar, 26,… Read More Rushdie, Khomeini and Me
The spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord # 136 The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between the cyclical time that still governed the sphere of production and the irreversible time that was the theater of conflicts and regroupings among different peoples. The religions that evolved out of Judaism were… Read More Society of the Spectacle
After the truth-shower 