Liberal Arts Classes Could Teach Neil deGrasse Tyson a Thing or Two about the Path from Data to Wisdom

Your mileage may vary, but I immediately thought of Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, who states this problem in negative terms. Yes, she’s a made-up character delivering a line in a movie about an imaginary ring from a fantasy book, but anyone who really understands Tolkien’s story will have reflected on the…

Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry

My sister the computer programmer benefitted early in her career because she was an excellent writer. She was so good at taking notes that people would invite to her important meetings so there would be a good record, and people would consult her about important topics covered during those meetings. My brother the electrical engineer…

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Similar:The Days of Microsoft Internet Explorer Are Numbered—But Its Sorry Legacy Will Live OnStarting today, Microsoft will no longer…BusinessThe Psychology of Getting More Done In Less TimeSummary of not-so-new scholarship, but p…CultureThink Like A Journalist | Kelsey Samuels | TEDxPlano  CultureDonald Trump's chilling escalation of his war with the mediaA journalist’s response to President Tru…Current_EventsA…

The American Scholar: Celebrity Profiles

Phllip Lopate writes a good essay on the challenges of writing a celebrity profile. My take: Just as Plato argued that ideal leaders would be so well-balanced that they would not desire to lead (and thus would not have the power-lust that would enable them to rise above their competitors), it follows that ideal celebrity profile writers would be…

My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World

As my father [Neil Postman] pointed out, a written sentence has a level of verifiability to it: it is true or not true – or, at the very least, we can have a meaningful discussion over its truth. (This was pre-truthiness, pre-“alternative facts”.) But an image? One never says a picture is true or false.…

Business is the most popular college major, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good choice

Make that dime-a-dozen business degree more marketable. Study the humanities or the arts, too! Learn how to develop critical thinking, self-reflection, compassion and wisdom that will help you decide what to count or measure or build, and why. And, hey, artsy people! Take a statistics or grant-writing or computer programming class. The world needs more balanced…

How To Escape The Procrastination Doom Loop

Instead of being lazy or disorganized, people usually put things off because they aren’t in the right mood to complete the task. Doing so places you firmly inside the procrastination doom loop. Since you’ve decided that you aren’t in the right mood to work, you distract yourself with other tasks—checking email, checking the news, cleaning…

This is How Literary Fiction Teaches Us to Be Human

Practicing empathy through drama and poetry and art and games and face-to-face conversations and human acts of all kinds matters. This article covers the specific social benefits that come from reading literary fiction. Film critic Roger Ebert called movies the most powerful empathy machines, but someone with the right knowledge base can say pretty much…

The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb.

The song “No One Is Alone,” from the musical Into the Woods, always gives me chills. Last year when my daughter was learning it in her voice class, I helped her work through some of the words. While the whole musical has a dark tone that I find comes too close to nihilism, in the context of…