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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
“Location’s very important. If you think about, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the location of the DMV in Washington, DC, is not important at all. Basically, if you want to deal with the DMV, you have to go where they put their offices. But Starbucks realized they don’t have that kind of power. They […]
The Education Carnival is now up. Go read some excellent posts on American education. LINK
Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Carleton Washburne, embody the Adjustment period from 1920 to 1954. Mitchell with her friend Caroline Pratt founded the City and Country School in New York City as her children entered school in the 1920s. Mitchell had tried unsuccessfully to break the formalism of the New York City schools, and having inherited family money, she decided to establish a school of her own design. Its 1922 program of arts, play, shop, rest, as well as a little reading, is revealed in this chart showing the “Greenwich Village School Program, 1922 -1923.”
The feature article at Tech Central Station today is a wonderful review by Arnold Kling of Tim Harford’s book The Undercover Economist. Kling does not shrink from making the “inevitable comparison with Freakonomics.” Kling gives his “enthusiastic recommendation to The Undercover Economist” over its best-selling rival. (Click HERE to read Kling’s review of Freakonomics). Kling […]
The central metaphor of Richard Pacelle’s review of Advice and Consent by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal in the Law & Politics Book Review is just too entertaining to avoid posting. At the appropriate age (and, truth be told, maybe a little beyond that), I would anxiously anticipate the second or third week of the […]
I couldn’t help but notice – try as I might to resist – this story from a few weeks ago in which Madonna, aka Esther, claimed that she’d likely get less grief from the media if she had become a Nazi instead of devoting herself to kabbalah. It made me think of this image from […]
Marginal Revolution reports that the first signed copy of Freakonomics has been sold for $610. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and original owner of the book, has donated the proceeds of the Ebay auction to Levitt’s favorite charity, Smile Train, and Levitt has matched that amount with a donation of his own.
The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina exposed an array of glaring deficiencies in America’s infrastructure – the slow response from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and the fragile state of the New Orleans levees are perhaps the most prominent. But, according to Jill Quadagno, the most imposing challenge brought to light by Katrina […]
In the afterglow of Watergate, Washington journalists’ ever-growing reliance on anonymous sources left both reporters and editors vulnerable to manipulation. As editor of the Post’s Metro section, Bob Woodward failed to challenge a promising young reporter who submitted a sensational article on an eight-year-old drug addict, based entirely on anonymous sources. After Janet Cooke won the Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s World” in 1981, an internal investigation exposed the story as fictitious. The Cooke incident derailed Woodward’s rise within the Post’s management and resulted in his nebulous position as assistant managing editor.
Patricia Graham provides historical context to today’s battles over public education.
by James C. Cobb I was alternatively puzzled and amused by the torrent of praise showered on Rosa Parks, one of the most celebrated social activists of the twentieth century, by many of the same folks who are quick to condemn other activists who allegedly operate from a lofty court bench rather than a lowly […]
Andrew Smith, culinary guru and editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, asks “Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?” and investigates the history and culinary traditions of this most American of holidays. With detours to the creation of the turducken and other culinary oddities.
“If President John F. Kennedy had lived, he would not have sent combat troops to Vietnam and America’s longest war would never have occurred,” say Kennedy apologists. The assassination, they insist, had killed more than the president; it was responsible for the death of a generation—of more than 58,000 Americans, along with untold numbers of […]
Tim Harford is selling his signed copy of Freakonomics on Ebay with the proceeds to go to Steven Levitt’s favorite charity, Smile Train. The story behind the auction, which is supported by Levitt, comes from an interview Harford did with Levitt in the spring. The current bid is $500, click here to get in on […]
James Cobb wrote in The New Republic online yesterday that this may be a watershed moment in the Civil Rights movement. He tries to unwind the knot surrounding the confluence of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Ed. decision last year, the passing of Rosa Parks and the nomination of Samuel Alito […]
Galleycat reports today that Constance Quarterman Bridges won the 2005 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for Lions Don’t Eat Us. Everyone at OUP offers her our hearty congratulations! The following poem by Ms. Bridges was published in The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry edited by Arnold Rampersad. Gordian Knot “Great-grandfather Fray was a white man. He […]