From Slate, The Cult of the Pink Tower: Montessori turns 100—what the hell is it? Leaving a big mess on campus: As school ends, students abandon clothes, fridges, ramen and more. Activists collect them for charities. Why do Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley — and dozens of other women's colleges — stubbornly carry on as single-sex institutions? Some colleges want to curb flow of data to magazine: Annual rankings by U.S. News called misleading; "peer reputation" survey particularly criticized.
Iraq's Universities Near Collapse: Hundreds of professors and students have been killed or kidnapped, hundreds more have fled, and those who remain face daily threats of violence. Africa’s storied colleges, jammed and crumbling: Far from being a repository of the continent’s hopes for the future, Africa’s decrepit universities have become hotbeds of discontent. British, French and German universities will be overtaken by those in China and India within a decade unless they improve quality and access. Purple patches on nation and state and democracy and populism by John Lukacs.
From The New York Times, Tick-Tock and Other Pulses of the West: What do inventions like clocks say about Western culture? Edward Rothstein investigates. A review of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction by Fredric Jameson. Even as NASA prepares again to go to the moon, Dark Side of the Moon seeks to dispel some of the received myths from that earlier escapade.
A review of Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson and Einstein: A Biography by Jürgen Neffe. A review of The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier. A review of The Poincaré Conjecture: in Search of the Shape of the Universe by Donal O'Shea. A review of Unknown Quantity: a Real and Imagined History of Algebra by John Derbyshire. A review of Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood. The Darwin Correspondence Project put 5,000 letters to and from the father of evolution online last week. Now the public can track the evolution of the eponymous evolutionist.
A body of impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of prosocial behavior, including moral sentiments like empathy, precede the evolution of culture. An unspoken assumption is that accountability is always a good thing. A growing body of psychological experiments, however, shows that this assumption is wrong. From First Science, an article on the science of sleepwalking. And what is it that makes Superman Super? And is there any basis in real science for the man of steel?
