Max

“The university’s retreat from public benefits damaged their independence as institutions. It damaged their intellectual ability to see over the horizon to the next economy and society and not just adapt to the current one. The retreat damaged their financial solvency, as it undermined the case for public good provision on which public universities depended to offer high-quality education on a mass scale. The public university could not be heard arguing that it absolutely had to offer mass quality. What good were the educated masses in a tech age when all the valuable workers could fit onto the Google bus?”
― Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them

“third way to put language in its place is to think about how we use it. Writing and speaking do not consist of transcribing an interior monologue onto paper or playing it into a microphone. Rather, we engage in a constant give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey and the means our language offers to convey them. We often grope for words, are dissatisfied with what we write because it does not express what we wanted to say, or discover when every combination of words seems wrong that we do not really know what we want to say. And when we get frustrated by a mismatch between our language and our thoughts, we don’t give up, defeated and mum, but change the language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity. A handful of Western countries passed. Germany was an outstanding performer in Europe, while Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, and, surprisingly, Greece did well. New Zealand and Australia were champions on the Pacific rim. But most Western countries, particularly America and Britain, failed the test, humiliatingly so when compared with countries in Asia.”
― John Micklethwait, The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If it’s a duck, it’s likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that’s tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature