archive

Utopianism, economics, academia, education and science

From Spaces of Utopia, Gregory Claeys (London): Who needs Utopia? A dialogue with my utopian self (With apologies, and thanks, to H. G. Wells); Raffaella Baccolini ( Bologna): Dystopia Matters: On the Use of Dystopia and Utopia; Peter Kraftl (Northampton): Spacing out an unsettling utopian ethics; Lisa Garforth (York): Ideal Nature: Utopias of Landscape and Loss Paul B Smith (Paisley): Utopia and the Socialist Project; Chloë Houston (London): No Place and New Worlds: The Early Modern Utopia and the Concept of the Global Community; Laurent Loty ( Rennes): Which utopias for today? Historical considerations and propositions for a dialogical and paradoxical alterrealism; Mary Baine Campbell ( Brandeis): Utopia Now; and Richard Saage (Halle-Wittenberg): Socio-political Utopianism and the Demands of the 21st Century; Malcolm Miles (Plymouth): The End of Utopia: Imminent and Immanent Liberation; and Utopia Re-Interpreted: An interview with Vita Fortunati of the University of Bologna pdf.

A review of The Challenge of Human Rights: Their Origin, Development, and Significance by Jack Mahoney. A review of Can Human Rights Survive? A review of Leora Batnitzky's Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. A purple patch on a classless society by Hannah Arendt.

From Economic Principals, a review of Janos Kornai's By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey. Hip Heterodoxy: A group of economists is challenging the most basic assumptions of neoclassical economic theory, and their influence is growing. A History Hobby: Don't leave scholarship to the professionals.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a special report on what the rankings do for U.S. News. Mort Zuckerman abruptly ends an interview about the U.S. News College Rankings. Suicides a symptom of larger UC crisis: As more students with mental health problems enroll, campuses lack the resources to cope. But there may be hidden dangers. No-Sweat Sit-Ins Hit Academe: Will a donation from Nike deflect Stanford's efforts to curb sweatshop labor in the making of its sports regalia? Ask a Mexican: In what field of work would someone with a bachelor's in Chicano studies land?

From Great Britain, the myth of multiculturalism White pupils in urban schools are failing academically: why? (and two responses). Jay Matthews on why AP and IB schools soar. Strike Up the Band: Children at a Catholic school make music, and progress. Research finds young babies can discriminate between different languages just by looking at an adult's face, even if they do not hear a single spoken word.

Hold tight as we look at modern scientific advances and ask "Why aren't we dead yet?": 5 ways science wants to kill you. It came like yesterday: The first human inhabitants of North America may not have exterminated the mammoths. The culprit might have been a comet. Research suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs, wiping out the Clovis culture. And Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs: At the $27 million Creation Museum, evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel