“Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full-grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies, and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that J.R.R. Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream
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Just when you thought you’d seen it all in the public school system. Imagine sending your child to school with money to buy lunch, and then being told that the child was attempting to use “fake” money to buy said lunch. (And that your child had “admitted” it was fake.) Well, that’s what reportedly happened
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Debates about models of political economy typically polarize between advocates of laissez-faire capitalism and full-on socialism. It’s as if the only choices were (a) “every man for himself” in the free market, with little or no social safety net, or (b) government owning or running the most vital sectors of the economy, for the sake
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An interesting article from the New York Post was brought to my attention the other day. The article, written by Anna Davies, declared that single and childless women should be entitled to lengthy, excused absences from work, a concept akin to maternity leave without the children. Davies calls this leave a “meternity.” The reasoning behind
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On May 4th, 1945, future British actress and Hollywood icon Audrey Hepburn celebrated her 16th birthday. Although a girl’s 16th birthday is often a special occasion, turning 16 was even more special for Hepburn, for the day also marked the liberation of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands—the Nazi-occupied Netherlands under which Hepburn had lived since 1939. The
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Over the years, I’ve heard a number of teachers and parents say a variation of the following: “I don’t care what the child reads, just as long as he is reading!” This statement always makes me uneasy. I can see the need to give a child interesting material, but I question the wisdom of letting
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