
Which hard skill do recent college grads lack the most? In 2016, PayScale.com asked employers this question. The top response was “writing proficiency.” Wow. Our education system teaches few practical skills, but it does emphasize writing. So what gives? Incompetent teachers? Unteachable students? Actually, the problem for many college graduates is having absorbed their academic
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For 28 years, Union Square’s iconic cafe the Coffee Shop—located at 29 Union Square West—served New Yorkers and tourists who wanted to get a glimpse of where Carrie Bradshaw and her friends would hang out on Sex and the City. (The coffee shop was frequently featured on the hit HBO show. And yes, ahem, I’ve
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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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