Category: Essays

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Bullying Librarians Is for Know-Nothings

Right-wing activists have taken over school boards across the country, banning books on topics from slavery to the Holocaust, rejecting courses like AP African American Studies, and prohibiting teachers from discussing gender identity in the classroom. Now, in a comically transparent escalation of this anti-intellectual crusade, they are targeting libraries. Worse, they’ve embraced a characteristically cruel approach to doing so: bullying librarians. Read more

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The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession

The average number of available new “tenure track” university jobs, which are secure jobs that provide living wages, benefits and stability, between 2020 and 2022 was 16 percent lower than it was for the four years before the pandemic. The report further notes that only 27 percent of those who received a Ph.D. in history in 2017 were employed as tenure track professors four years later. Read more

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Writing Your Own Obituary Can Teach You How to Live

There’s a misconception that obituaries are about death. In reality, they’re about life. Sure, they include things like cause of death and the loved ones of the deceased. But a good obit should paint a vivid picture of the life someone lived, of how that person might want to be remembered. Read more

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The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions

We enjoy each other’s company. We drink coffee, we eat crackers, we get reacquainted with each other’s love lives, and we have an excuse to read the books that’ll appear on The New York Times’s notable list this year. And of course, reading the books is the point. The whole book club is predicated on the notion that reading these books will improve our minds in some way, and that it’ll contribute measurably to our intellectual lives. And yet, month after month, I leave each meeting feeling as if we’ve engaged in an empty, meaningless exercise. Read more

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No, Capitalism and the Internet Will Not Free China’s People

The West has been wrong about China. It was long assumed that capitalism, the emergence of a middle class and the internet would cause China to eventually adopt Western political ideas. But these ideas cannot even begin to take root because the Communist Party has never allowed the intellectual soil needed for them to germinate. And it never will. Read more

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