From the category archives:

Culture

A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

How universities should exist to make minds, not careers

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But …

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Against Camel Case

Put some distance between you and your Master Card; don’t let your Iphone make the rules. You don’t have to buy their language. It already

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On Samuel Johnson’s Worth Today

Though an excellent poet and storyteller, aside from his critical power, Johnson now matters most as a wisdom writer. His test for literary criticism was …

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Information Overload, Renaissance Edition

While the extreme availability of information today should presumably have highlighted its relative paucity in earlier periods, historians–most notably Ann Blair–have in fact extended the

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Absurdist Literature Stimulates Our Brains

The befuddled tramps in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are a poetic personification of paralysis. But new research suggests the act of watching them actually

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What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies?

My hopes aren’t quite as ambitious as they were 20 years ago. I no longer expect cultural studies to transform the disciplines.

via What’s the …

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The Decline of the English Department

English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit.

via The Decline of the …

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Christopher Hitchens on Irving Kristol

As for the image of a neoconservative as a liberal “mugged by reality”: Once people got over their affected fuss about the possible innuendo in

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