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

. Stay weird

Lastly, we need to accept the fundamental trippy weirdness of imagination, the sheer play of it, and not always reduce it to functional adaptation. There must be room for the surreal, the fantastic, the idealistic and even the nonsensical. Even in the full bloom of the scientific revolution, thinkers of all stripes – Emanuel Swedenborg... See more