- Western New Mexico University
- University of South Carolina
- University of New Hampshire
- University of Missouri – Columbia
- University of Tennessee
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via The New York Times:
The German Auto Industry, a Pillar of the National Psyche, Is Trembling
by Jack Ewing and Jim Tankersley
published on August 3, 2026
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In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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“If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them,” Dolly Parton once said. She was talking about makeup and plastic surgery, things she felt no shame in loving, but it’s hard to read that quote and not also think about what it means to be a visionary—to invent a whole world from nothing.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker
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People who have worked in both China and Silicon Valley tend to comment on the similarities: the belief in rapid change, the power of engineers, the odes to humanity that mask impatience with actual humans.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker
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Empires of the past were built upon the idea that conquest was the divine right of great powers. There was no legal distinction between the acquisition, occupation and takeover of foreign territory. The Portuguese did as they wished in Angola, and the British did as they wished in India.
~ Linda Kinstler via The New York Times
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