The Illiberalism in Our Institutions
a crisis of confidence in the relevance of the humanities.
Tim Leberecht • The Business Romantic
“It is a curious thing,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, “but the ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next.” The ideas of critical theorists became the instincts of millennials. It wasn’t necessary to have read Foucault or studied under Judith Butler to become adept with terms like “centered,” “marginalized,” “privilege,” and “harm”; to belie
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse. In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutio... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
But a little shift back to an appreciation of the power of collective goals, to an ethic of care and maintenance, a love of art not necessarily for art’s sake but for more than just a stimulus of new ideas, a respect for thoughtful research and knowledge, and above all the space to question the goodness of the new might just be the big idea we need
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