Worthwhile Reading

A law professor writes about undoing the dis-education of Millenials.

Small liberal arts colleges:  self-destruction via runaway administration.

Ammo Grrrll doesn’t share the obsession about ‘people who look like me’.

Are we living in the dystopia that Young Adult fiction warns us about?

The Assistant Village Idiot has some thoughts about local aristocracy and the nationalization of culture.

Bolshevism and Militant Islam.  Some thoughts about historical parallels from Niall Ferguson, with comments by Stuart Schneiderman.

The current Senate tax bill draft contains some very bad ideas about taxation of employee stock options and restricted stock grants.

3 thoughts on “Worthwhile Reading”

  1. I am not normally drawn to women’s romance fiction but I have been reading a series of novels called the “Outlander Series.”

    They are written by a woman with an interesting history.

    Gabaldon grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona.[7] She earned a bachelor of science in zoology from Northern Arizona University, 1970–1973; a master of science in marine biology from the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1973–1975; and a PhD in behavioral ecology from Northern Arizona University, 1975–1978.[7][9]

    Gabaldon was the founding editor of Science Software Quarterly in 1984 while employed at the Center for Environmental Studies at Arizona State University.[10] During the mid-1980s, Gabaldon wrote software reviews and technical articles for computer publications, as well as popular-science articles and comic books for the Walt Disney Company.[9] She was a professor with an expertise in scientific computation at ASU for 12 years before leaving to write full-time.[9][11]

    In 1988, Gabaldon decided to write a novel for “practice, just to learn how” and with no intention to show it to anyone.

    In the past 25 years she has written nine novels in the series and there is a TV serial of the early novels on Starz which is in its third season.

    Her historical research is quite good and what I have been able to check is accurate.

    There is an element of science fiction as the characters time travel, at least the modern characters are able to travel back to colonial times.

  2. In 2009 you recommended The Puritan’s Gift. Only lately have I read it; loaned it to my MBA friend who also enjoyed it. Clearly the same pattern they described in business led to the purposeful curriculum of those schools in earlier times – and the same downfall. I’m not sure if they can be rescued or brought back; the values that were the backbone have been undermined and the administrations are not as easily replaced as those in business (or at least that layered hierarchy is hard to prune – of course presidents can easily be moved out and often move on, but not the layered bureaucracy they leave behind). And it is hard to go back to the pre-publish and perish or even pre-politicized world of these institutions. However, we can see two examples of the political touch – Sasse’s Midland adventure and Jane Sanders’ Burlington College one. Sharp has continued the expansion of the big school (with Corbusier like apartments facing the campus in depressing and awesome heights. A&M continues its tradition of major activities done without the supervision of faculty as they try to nurture leadership. But that continuation must surely be different for 60,000 students than for 8,000. I loved the connection and frontispiece with Winthrop, though 2009 must have seen Obama in more hopeful ways than it seems to me true.

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