Every time we postpone some necessary event—whether we put off doing the dishes till morning or defer an operation or some difficult labor or study—we do so with the implication that present time is more important than future time (for if we wished the future to be as free and comfortable as we wish the present to be, we would perform the necessary actions as soon as they prove themselves necessary). There is nothing wrong with this, as long as we know what we are doing, and as long as the present indeed holds some opportunity more important than the task we delay. But very often our decision to delay is less a free choice than a semiconscious mechanism—a conspiracy between our reasoning awareness and our native dislike of pain. The result of this conspiracy is a disconcerting contradiction of will; for when we delay something, we simultaneously admit its necessity and refuse to do it. Seen more extensively, habitual delays can clutter our lives, leave us in the annoying position of always having to do yesterday’s chores. Disrespect for the future is a subtly poisonous disrespect for the self, and forces us, paradoxically, to live in the past.
Yorkshire, England
However wrongheaded you believe your ideological opponents to be, laying ‘all that ails the world’ at their feet represents an absurd politicization of human affairs, and a spur to the most self-deluding sort of utopianism. After all, what ultimately ails the world is its inherent imperfectibility — its fallen character, if you’re a Christian; its irreducible complexity and tendency toward entropy and dissolution, if you’re a strict materialist. This is true on all the great issues of the day. No matter how many lives may be saved or lost because of health care policy, no lives will be saved forever, and every gain will be an infinitely modest hedge against the wasting power of disease and death. No matter the wisdom of our politicians or the sagacity of their economic advisors, no policy course can guarantee universal wealth or permanent economic growth. And no matter the temperature of our discourse, the state of our gun laws, or the quality of our mental health care, nothing human beings do can prevent the occasional madman from shooting up a crowded parking lot.
If photography was once for special occasions, today we have an astonishing ability to document every passing moment. That can, of course, be a lot of fun. If nothing else, the whole world now knows that you really do look different after a few drinks. But the ease of photography has also spawned an ambition to create a record of our lives that is roughly as long as our lives. If some primitives once supposedly feared that photography would steal their souls, today we fear that to fail to photograph is to lose something forever. But fighting time is a losing battle. The effort to record everything is vain and soon starts to feel empty.
Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge – while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.
Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or losses in learning.
Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)
The truth is that as remarkable as Steve Jobs has been in many ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.
Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale. Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems… .This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.
Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?
To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news ‘story’ as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often 'advices’ of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Post and the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as 'the Reverend Bruiser’) and the Reverend William Jackson (known as 'Dr. Viper’) packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes. Much of it came from a bountiful source: the coffee house.
It soon became clear, however, that despite his personal warmth and charisma, when it came to Church dogma [John Paul II] was stern and intractably conservative—reviving the doctrine of papal infallibility, and censuring Church officials he perceived to be excessively liberal.
When general interest magazines write about Christianity, they almost never get their facts right. For instance, John Paul made no changes whatsoever to the doctrine of papal infallibility. It couldn’t be “revived” because it hadn’t declined: it was the same when he assumed the papacy and when he died, and it’s the same now. Presumably all that’s meant here is that he didn’t try to have the doctrine abolished (as if that were even possible, as if Catholic magisterial doctrine can simply be repealed like American laws.)
But that’s the way these things always go. I’m more interested in the little rhetorical flourishes, e.g.: despite his charisma, he was theologically conservative. As though there is a natural connection between being personally charming and being theologically liberal, and anyone who is the first but not the second is committing some offense against the natural order of things… .