Monthly Archives: June 2024

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Building on a Confucian tradition of respect for knowledge, a century-old tradition of university building and a ton of newfound wealth, over the past 20 years China has been steadily building a set of institutions to take on the United States for scientific leadership. But does it have the money, talent and recipe for governance required to achieve this goal?
~ Alex Usher via The World of Higher Education Podcast

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To be sure, knowledge work does often require high levels of education and skill, but in recent years we’ve increasingly drowned the application of such talents in a deluge of distraction. We can blame this, in part, on the rise of low-friction digital communication tools like e-mail and chat. Office collaboration now takes place largely through a frenzy of back-and-forth, ad-hoc messaging, punctuated by meetings.The satisfactions of skilled labor are unavoidably diluted when you can only dedicate partial attention to your efforts.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker

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Generation X is small, a great baby bust, and we are now caring for the far larger generations that tower over us on either side—often while working full-time. Since the 1980s, middle-aged adults have been called the “sandwich generation,” wedged between caring for their parents and raising their kids. But this metaphor feels too innocuous for what Gen X is going through. I find myself drawn to a less friendly analogy: not that of fresh Wonder Bread slices gently squishing us, but that of panini grills pressing us flat.
~ Ada Calhoun via The Atlantic

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