Category: ideas

“If I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three, or five, we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx’s, Freud’s, Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or whoever’s — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish that we’d declare a moratorium on readings. I wish that we’d give readings a rest.”

“If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps.”

“The Georgia Guidestones may be the most enigmatic monument in the US: huge slabs of granite, inscribed with directions for rebuilding civilization after the apocalypse. Only one man knows who created them–and he’s not talking.”

“Scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby’s mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they’ve revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation – they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.”

“Does the brain naturally compose melodies to rival those by Mozart or Chopin? Researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) think so.”

“In the coming months, cheap headsets that let you control technology with the electrical signals generated by your firing neurons will go on sale to the general public. Our relationship with technology – and our brains – will never be the same again.”

“It was as if some immense laboratory experiment had gone on for half a century according to rigorous principles: Take a single defeated society, weary with guilt, wounds and hatred, and divide it in two … [and] see what kinds of worlds develop under very different visions of social and political order. […] Twenty years ago [the Wall] seemed immutable, a force that bent the natural world to its demands. Now it seems like something from a storybook.”

Back in the 1980s, the ideas that scholars like the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick developed into “queer theory” caused quite the uproar and helped ignite the culture wars. “Now queer theory is as at home on many college campuses as men’s lacrosse and late-night lattes … [and it has] had more influence outside the academy than anyone might have imagined.”

“Though America’s captains of finance have been pilloried for their greed and though the financial collapse has been attributed to avarice, the collapse may actually have had less to do with greed per se than with a certain mindset that seems to have been adopted by Wall Street from Hollywood. In short, you can blame the Hollywoodization of Wall Street for our economic woes.”

Madrasas have a reputation for teaching their students to recite the Quran from memory, some shariah law and little else – leaving their graduates ill-equipped for the interconnected, high-tech world of today. But a madrasa in Singapore is establishing (and exporting) a new model: a science- and math-heavy modern curriculum with religious instruction added on during additional class time.