Most Read from past 24 hours






In his widely discussed book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz ponders why the interests and imagined possibilities of so many students tend to narrow rather than expand during higher education. As freshmen, he notes, many enter with big plans to be poets, statesmen, teachers, filmmakers, or whatever, but are funneled into narrow tracks of career options
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If you took a nice summer vacation, you might have missed the latest frenzy in American political culture: the huge movement to ban plastic straws. It’s real. Several cities in California have passed “straw-on-request” laws. Companies such as Starbucks have promised to eliminate them in two years, though one wonders how paper is going to
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Delayed gratification seems to be the parenting buzz word of the moment. In every in-depth conversation I’ve had with fellow moms in the last year, this has come up as one of those “important things” we need to teach our kids. In an age of abundance, how do we teach children to value their belongings?
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For more than thirty years G. K. Chesterton wrote a weekly essay for the Illustrated London News. In a 1932 piece, now known as “The Loss of True Paganism,” Chesterton took note of a phenomenon that is still very much with us today. The phenomenon in question was the decline of religious belief and religious practice
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I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about really tough love. The best way to motivate students is to challenge them with realistic (and therefore tough) assessments of their shortcomings. It’s a good idea to shout
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It’s National Employee Freedom Week, and a majority of public-sector union members agree with a recent Supreme Court ruling banning the collection of fees without express consent, according to a just-released poll. The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, was brought against government unions for charging non-members “agency fees.” In
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