You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include... See more

The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way that they’ve been hijacked as ideological programs of cultural change by many elite universities. I mean humanities broadly understood as the exploration of what it truly means to be human and the... See more