Journalist Mark Oppenheimer, from a good Conor Friedersdorf interview: I have a deep skepticism of a lot of what passes for “progressive” education. For grades 2-4, I attended a progressive school that was pretty disastrous for me. They had lots of touchy-feely, student-centered ways to teach math and science, but they weren’t very interested in…

Anthony Lane has a witty and terrific essay about the Eurovision Song Contest in the current issue of The New Yorker. Sadly, it’s not available online, except to subscribers. The poor man actually traveled to Oslo to cover this year’s Eurovision event. Lane writes about the ultra-cheesy but ultra-popular pan-European institution, and ponders one of…

Walter Russell Mead takes note of tectonic, and potentially terrifying, changes in China as that nation rushes from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Excerpts: Bewildered by urban life, desperate to win some kind of a foothold, living from hand to mouth and sending money to children or aged parents at home, these workers…

Wendell Berry has withdrawn all his papers from the University of Kentucky in protest of what he considers the university’s sellout to coal interests. Excerpt: Berry, 75, said UK’s push to become a “Top 20” research university has caused it to stray from its land-grant university obligation to address Kentucky’s problems. “The coal business came…

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