Tara McMullin

And an American college is only true to itself when it opens its doors to all—rich, middling, and poor—who have the capacity to embrace the precious chance to think and reflect before life engulfs them. If we are serious about democracy, that means everyone.

Research as a way of life is having the ability and the time to question the world around you and add to its understanding. It’s defined by our access and ability to contribute to production of knowledge and evaluate the information around us.

We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.

Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more

If you’ve used all of your creative powers to come up with a cure for cancer and you want to follow a playbook for the FDA approval process, by all means, do that.

But it seems as if too often, people are going through the FDA approval process in hopes that it will lead them to the cure, metaphorically speaking.

Untangling the question of what I want to make from what will sell feels like crawling out of a very deep well.

What’s more, art is no longer semblance. It fuses with reality.