Education
A middle school teacher in Nebraska, on mandatory standardized testing: Politicians (and business people/capitalists) are competitive. They have a challenge, they try harder, and succeed. They see this as the solution to education: raise the bar, tougher standards, more competition. They don't see the reality, that not
History
"The choice of Athens as capital [of newly independent Greece], a town dominated by the imposing ruins of the Parthenon and with its associations with the glories of the Periclean age but in the early 1830s little more than a dusty village, symbolised the cultural orientation of the new
Education
ex parte -- G. K. Chesterton, 1906
Intellect
A book review in the New Statesman pinpoints two valid parts of Michel Foucault's work: "[...] [I]t is easy to forget that Foucault's influence stems from a simple but penetrating insight, developed early in his career: that the history of western civilisation is also the
Remarks
I presume that Samuel Beckett did not intend to write an 18-word secularized summary of the Book of Ecclesiastes, but: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Politics
An e-mail to Fox News: Al Franken's upcoming bookthe lawsuit that Fox News has filed against its release I'm amazed that a news network seems so unaware of the concept of "free publicity". /s/ Steve Casburn
Remarks
is -- Clive James, praising Mark Twain's "homespun demotic" style
Remarks
"The only reliable lesson the past teaches us is how locked we are in the present. People ask, Where are the great Hollywood movies, the great pop songs, the great television newsmen, the great Democratic presidents, the great public intellectuals, the Great Books?, as though these were all eternally
Intellect
In his recent book, Fooled by Randomness, hedge-fund operator Nassim Taleb twists a familiar saying to provide an analogy for people (such as, say, some mutual fund investors) who make investments based solely on past performance: IliadOdyssey Iliad
History
An odd quirk of history: A Churchill led England in 1704 at the beginning of her days of glory, and a Churchill led her in 1945 at their end. (G. K. Chesterton once made a similar remark, though he meant it disparagingly, about the Cecil family.
Politics
A headline writer for The Nation asserts the patriotism of Gore Vidal, a man who has deliberately and ostentatiously lived outside his patria for decades.
Money
Ben Stein's new book, You Can Time the Market (No, Ben, you can't.)