Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red is an important book about race, wealth and social policy. Published in the late 1990s, a version with a new afterword came out in 2010. It was important then and it remains relevant today. Many believe that rising inequality is one of the most pressing problems facing American today.…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Doing Good Works
You’re on a ship, the weather turns stormy, and you see a fellow passenger fall overboard. Risking life and limb, you jump into the water, rescue the floundering soul, and get them back to safety. You are hailed as a hero – well done. A philosopher teaching ethics would look at this scenario through two…
College Without Security
The Hope Lab at the University of Wisconsin, working with the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds Study, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Single Stop, a national organization focused on helping economically vulnerable students and their families, posted at the end of 2015 a powerful report – Hungry To Learn – on food and…
Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize
Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…
Stories and Histories: Journeys and Meaning
When I taught history, I sought conversations with students at the end of the semester about the course. What mattered to them? What would they remember, if anything, in the semester or years to come? Learning outcomes assessment evaluations and summary grades are valuable, but there’s nothing like an open-ended conversation with a student. It is often…
Making Sense of Signals in the Noise
Quick! Your favorite 18th century English philosopher is . . . David Hume? Edmund Burke? Adam Smith or Bishop Berkeley? Don’t worry if one one comes to mind – Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, has a provocative suggestion: Thomas Bayes. Silver is a terrific statistician and…
Partying Promises That Access Does Not Equal Success
Are our years in college the best one’s life? If so, is it because of the opportunities for personal growth, intellectual development, and lifelong friendships? Or does the myth of college rest on parties and Bacchanalian excess? The answer is probably a bit of both. One of the best places to answer that question are our…