Category: Now Reading

Unless you’re an Atlantic subscriber and read the January issue, you probably haven’t heard about David Weinberger’s new book Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that Facts Aren’t Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room because it hasn’t yet attracted a lot of reviews. But forget that: go to your bookstore or Internet bookseller. Buy it, download it, whatever: this is an important book which deftly outlines the real challenges faced by

Remember the nineties, when books like Tenured Radicals and Illiberal Education appeared? All that formulaic bad journalism masquerading as social critique? Cookie-cutter stuff, really: just find a couple of examples of people in group X doing something ludicrous/criminal, and then use this as a justification to vilify all people in group X, preferably while inventing a string of belittling nicknames for them. And of course you thought to yourself: this is Ezra Levant/Fox News stuff, not something a serious academic would

With a title like Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – and What We Can Do About It, you might assume this is another screed by a thirty-something with an axe to grind. But the authors – Andrew Hacker of Queen’s College and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus – are anything but the usual suspects for ritual denunciations of higher learning. What Hacker and Dreifus have managed is to fuse together a number