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School reform efforts across the country hang on the notion of annual teacher evaluations based heavily on student test scores. But if this process isn’t consistently accurate, it will get the wrong teachers fired and discourage talented people from entering the profession.

I’m nonplussed by Mary Elizabeth Williams’ comment today, over at Salon, that Anthony Weiner’s impending fatherhood “drastically changed” the Weinergate drama. Not that I disagree that “the timing of Weiner’s […]

The Strange Death of Radical Journalism  And so to another inconvenient truth that should trouble anyone interested in the clash of ideas, real passion in journalism, polemic and a radicalism […]

John Jeremiah Sullivan has written a beautiful, beautiful piece about David Foster Wallace in GQ. It isn’t easy to write about Wallace; how Sullivan chooses to do it is illuminating. […]

They live in a parallel society, a world apart, where they obey an alien law and pray to an alien God. Their liberal allies foolishly promote toleration and claim these […]

Janet Malcolm is a careful writer. The new Paris Review has an interview with her. The Review still publishes the best interviews on code-cracking the art of writing. This exchange—which […]

We are working longer hours and retiring later so why shouldn’t we compensate by taking a pill to stimulate our brain—what’s the objection to staying awake and concentrating better?

Tiny Fey’s new memoir, Bossypants, sets out some smart principles of management and leadership among amusing and insightful anecdotes.

French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner says the values that accompany our time’s ceaseless drive to be happy are counterproductive—what we need, he says, is a new humility.

If you love The Economist, you likely know and love its back page, its obituary page. Economist obituaries are models of the magazine’s style and, more broadly, models of a […]

The first issue of the Journal of Animal Ethics unexpectedly ruffled some feathers with an editorial note on terminology. The editors raised critics’ hackles by calling upon contributors to use […]

The main thing I try to remember whenever I write a piece for this blog is to stay in control of the narrative. The narrative is not just an academic […]

I already wrote once or twice about the mind change in our society that we are used to getting information or answers to our questions right now, anywhere we are. […]

William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified, especially in the areas of science and politics?

Thinking about revolutions is inextricable from thinking about grief. We cannot know how many lives will be lost, but we know that those left behind will engage in personal and […]

The Newspaper Guild has called on bloggers to form an ‘electronic picket line’ around the Huffington Post and boycott further posts until the HP changes its business model.

It will be one of the most closely—and widely—read speeches of any U.S. President in the twenty-first century, and perhaps even one of the most closely read of any U.S. […]

In his recent essay, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” star reporter Jose Antonio Vargas recalls being sent to the U.S. at the age of 12 to live with his […]

David Brooks of the New York Times delivered a lecture at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky last night. It was definitely the highlight of this trip to S.’s alma mater. […]

Usually I’m a pretty reasonable person. However, over the past day, various items in the media have begun to drive me mad. Maybe I’ve been watching too much of Ramsay’s […]

[The See/Saw Contest for Japan Continues; see the end of this post]I never met the man or even heard him speak, but hearing that art historian and author Leo Steinbergpassed […]

Amy Davidson’s post about the WikiLeaks Guantanamo release is an excellent example of writing short, with feeling—and meaning. One reason so many of the New Yorker blogs work well with […]

Is the exchange of amorous declarations between partners now forever delegated to the insulting greetings card and the wholly unpassionate email?

The physicist and comic book enthusiast outlines technologies that were once imagined by science fiction writers that have now found social utility.

Marc Goodman tells Big Think that in the future “the virtual agents of good and evil will do battle in cyberspace–making this a very interesting field to be in!”

X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis and best-selling technology writer Nicholas Carr both speak to both the dreams and fears of what the web is becoming.

Here’s an exaggerated account of the slide of our professors into the proletariat given by The Nation, our leading journal on the left.  Let me repeat what I’ve said before:  Good […]

Before chemistry was ‘chemistry’ there was alchemy. Alchemists sought to change gray lead into gold, well, gold. Sounds reasonable. The atomic number of lead is 82. Gold’s atomic number is […]

Is the computer really a better pencil? Will it lead to better writing? Just about every other new writing instrument has been seen as a threat to literacy and a corrupter of youth.

The sixty four thousand dollar question this week is, “how long do we have to wait before Donald Trump and the rest of the inhabitants of Pale Nation, that stubborn […]