Louis Menand
Louis Menand
Louis Menandis an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America...
decision needs way
The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.
thinking students kind
Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
students courses
You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
fun thinking fields
I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.
thinking discipline curriculum
The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.
years careers ideas
Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.
writing people intellectual
I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.
character thinking stories
I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.
writing people kind
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
reading people pieces
Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.
writing oddities ideas
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
lines trends be-kind
Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
jobs teaching school
It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.
jobs thinking people
I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.