Hm 🤔
“ ...the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections. It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people.“
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
“Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” Leo said. ... “We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent. Indifferent to the deaths of thousands of people.”
🕊️ 🕊️ 🕊️
#Pope #Easter
wapo.st/4m8Zu1f
At a time when the value of higher education is being questioned, I thought Hutchins might have a few ideas to contribute.
“The aim of higher education is wisdom,“ for example.
🧵
An archival photograph of five women in evening gowns. In the center is Jan Porter, Miss University of Chicago 1954.
And when they weren’t reading Plato, etc. they had dances and beauty pageants, just like other universities of the time. Here is Jan Porter, Miss University of Chicago 1954, and her court at Washington Prom.
One of the Hutchins alumni, who’s in his eighties, asked me if he was the oldest person we had interviewed. Not even close.
I interviewed an alumna who graduated in **1942** and took a course with Hutchins himself.
The issue includes a double-length feature (6,100 words!)—an oral history of the Hutchins College, according to alumni who were in the College then. Under Hutchins the College came to be centered on a Great Books curriculum. As one alumnus put it, “I read Plato in every course except calculus.”
Cover of November 21, 1949 issue of Time magazine showing Robert Maynard Hutchins with the quote "Not a very good university ... simply the best there is."
Hutchins was handsome, charismatic, arrogant, witty, and ungovernable.
“Not a very good university,” he described the U of Chicago on the cover of Time magazine in 1949. “Simply the best there is.”
The cover of the Spring/26 issue of The Core, the alumni magazine for UChicago's undergraduate college, showing a line drawing of Robert Maynard Hutchins reading, with his other arm around a dog.
Just sent the Spring/26 issue of The Core to press.
That’s Robert Maynard Hutchins on the cover, drawn by his wife, artist and novelist Maude Hutchins.
He led the U of Chicago from 1929 to 1951 and made all kinds of radical educational experiments.
I decided to give up ugly thoughts for Lent which is going about as well as you might expect
a blue graphic with red and white text that reads: If you are represented by the congresspeople listed above: Call your reps. Tell them they must oppose this bill at every turn. It is egregiously unconstitutional, targets ideas based on ideological disapproval, and misleads parents and the public about the content of children's books. It does nothing to protect kids and will badly harm education. It will tie school material funding into knots and hurt anyone who is a library materials vendor, regardless of content. If you are a bookseller, librarian, or author, tell them your livelihood depends on the next generation of readers.
blue graphic with an outline of the United States. Red and white text reads: Call. National Book Banning Bill Proposed in US House of Reps. Tell your rep: Vote no on H.R. 7661.
We've had a day to pull a few things together, so here's a thread some more targeted info opposing the potential national book ban just proposed in the House of Representatives.
In 2019 I interviewed UChicago linguistics prof Lenore Grenoble about her work to preserve endangered languages:
“In the United States, perhaps we should all learn Spanish so we will be able to speak to our children and grandchildren.“
I can’t stop thinking about that.
mag.uchicago.edu/grenoble
If you are worried about our democracy, a quick and easy thing to do is subscribe to a newspaper. Any newspaper
Should I give up “lol” for Lent
I’ve read so much advice about forcing yourself to sit in a chair, hit a certain word limit per day, etc. like some kind of writing factory worker, and then here’s Toni Morrison:
“If I don’t have anything to say for three or four months, I just don’t write.”
💙📚
lithub.com/toni-morriso...
The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns, you know, **Amazon**, just got rid of its books section
💙 📚
www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
“Abolish ICE“ was submitted 9,200 times.
Nearly 80 percent of submissions were anti-ICE.
It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
blockclubchicago.org/2026/01/28/a...
I did not expect that Luigi Zingales's #ChicagoBooth course on crony capitalism would cover the history of the printing press, patents, double-entry accounting, government-funded research, newspaper bias, and so much more.
@uchicagomag.bsky.social
mag.uchicago.edu/economics-bu...
Writing an article about Chicago Booth’s amazing contemporary art collection in my usual font, Calibri, and feeling woke af
Hungry now
💙 📚
Amazing argument. Just amazing
... learning where the frontiers in a field are, the big questions, incompleteness, and areas a field has not yet tackled. Someone with a Ph.D. can often look at a graph and say, not ‘that isn’t true,‘ but ‘that data doesn’t exist.‘”
They learn methods for finding reliable information, when to be suspicious of data, and how to act upon those suspicions. In addition to learning what we know, a Ph.D. student gains expertise in what we don’t know ...
... before entering a work force which will not be, in five years, what it is now. ...
The Ph.D. process teaches broad expertise in research methods. Doctorate holders know how to evaluate evidence, chase down sources, verify claims.
Stunning contrarian op-ed from @adapalmer.bsky.social in the new issue of the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
www.chronicle.com/article/ther...
“This is a dire moment to enter the work force.
It is a perfect moment to spend four to seven years acquiring rare and valuable skills ...
Do we all need to hear this again?
Of course we need to hear this again
💙 📚
“There are so many rewards in the book industry but also so many problems, and sometimes the difference between success and failure, as in most pursuits, from finding a great apartment to finding a romantic partner, is nothing more than luck.“
💙 📚
lithub.com/dont-let-the...
