; Sometimes a period provides too much pause between two sentences, but the comma doesn’t provide enough. Luckily, the period and the comma had a drunken one-night stand and produced this adorable little spawn they named the semicolon.—Jenny Baranick, Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar (2014), p. 37 A semicolon symbolizes […]
Author: Michael
(after John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward”) for Katie Adkison, UCSB English graduate student Let Man’s Life be a Beach, and then you die;Hence carryed Southward for Spring Break we fly.For in this, our senior year of college,Our future businesse we don’t acknowledge,But prep Body and Soule to hit the sandIn shades and bikinis: […]
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020) by celebrityprofessor Michael J. Sandel presents weighty arguments for wholesale improvements ofAmerican society. Though the title is misleading (see below), this is a smart, insightfulbook. The author provides fact-based diagnoses of the growing inequality between ourhighly educated leadership and professional castes and the hoi […]
A paper presented to the Queen Elizabeth I Society atthe 66th South-Central Renaissance Conference in Atlanta All art has a metaphorical quality.—Keith Oatley Prologue STRETCHING BACK to their royal entries, which intertwined genealogy with mythology,we have over 500 years of Tudor fiction to ponder.1 As this audience knows, we’re nowenjoying a particular resurgence, spanning media […]
Things are always bad for you if they’re unprofessional. You always say, oh, that’s sounprofessional as though there’s some definition of professional that’s also a moralimperative for how to behave. I don’t even know what professional is anymore.—Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (2014), p. 34 Previews NOWADAYS MOST ADULT AMERICANS are either functional cogs […]
And flowers and grass and I and allWill in one common ruin fall …—Andrew Marvell, “The Mower’s Song,” lines 21-22 I. Too Much! The calamitous crises facing the denizens of our planet at present seem well-nighoverwhelming. Wherever one looks, there’s cause for alarm. Thousands of people liveand die in war zones; millions more lack food […]
L’hypocrisie est un vice à la mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour vertus.—Molière, Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre (1665) Might we be approaching a defining moment, a tipping point when liberal artseducation in America relinquishes any serious claims for beneficial utility or vatic cloutin the wider society and ceases […]
Building on the latest groundbreaking research into the adaptive origins and functionality of the brain, “Infinites of Worlds There May Be Found”: Renaissance English Culture through a Scientific Lens offers fresh, eye-opening ways to understand its subject better. The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology and the cognitive revolution in psychology are giving us nothing less […]
A talk delivered at the 2018 Cognitive Futures Conference, hosted by the University of Kent, England I must apologize. … I so deeply love good literature and hate so bitterly bad literaturethat my expressions may be stronger than they ought to be.—Professor Vladimir Nabokov (1941) Roasted! EVER SINCE SPURIOUS LINES attributed to Homer were being […]
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern WorldBy Adrian WooldridgeNew York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021. 482 pages. In this smart book, British journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge makes acompelling case that the turn to (limited) meritocracy was the key to most of thesignificant advances and achievements of our modern world. He explains how meritocracycame […]