Brian Sholis

- "The layers of the night are in fact the layers of the self; they offer the most random unfolding of the accumulations of experience—everything that happened and mattered and lapsed away as the next new thing claimed the attention. There is no way to guess what will suddenly surface in those hours. At times I need only to call to mind a specific ... See more

- “What is our role in the world? To what extent is our institution a vehicle for political progress as opposed to academic excellence? Rational decision-making is impossible if these questions are left hanging, but at the same time it’s not hard to see why nobody tries to resolve them.”

"This counsel is surely weighted toward white-collar knowledge work, although I hope it’s at least somewhat valuable to any reader."

Sometimes you find ideas for the future in stories from the past. This book is the best survey I know of covering adult education, which is pretty much what all education was in many of the decades it covers. The description:

- “If one function of a college like Swarthmore should be to create a good elite, another should be to give young people a taste for the life of the mind understood as an end in itself.”

* “The geographic circle of life has expanded, so friendship strategies that depend on constant proximity are no longer effective.”