Christine Hassler wants to be the go-to author for the twenty-year-old generation. Her latest, the 20 Something Manifesto: Quarter-Lifers Speak Out about Who They Are, What They Want, and How to Get It builds off an earlier work, 20 Something, 20 Everything and is probably found in your local bookstore’s self-help section. “You are not…
The Appointment
Herta Muller’s The Appointment (Picador, 1997) is a short novel told in the first person by a woman living in Ceausescu’s Romania. The narrator tells of her life, her history and her crime while riding the bus to her appointment with the police, an interrogator. The language is not so much stream of consciousness as…
Past Imperfect, Past Excellent – Tony Judt
In the late 1980s I completed a M.A. at New York University. My sense of disciplinary distinctions was not strong, foreshadowing other problems I’ve experienced staying within the lines. Interested in politics and history, my first course was comparative political science. It was not a good fit. Checking out the book store and course syllabi,…
Do You Really Want a Job?
Ask any group of prospective college students and their parents about the goal of a college education and the answer, more often than not, will involve the words “job” or “career.” Students, especially students around their parents, often talk about what they want to do after graduation. The arc of these conversations is inevitable, particularly…
Emerging Adulthood
The cover of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s Emerging Adulthood has the title superimposed on a L train entrance. The L train runs between the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan (14th Street & 8th Avenue), through Union Square and across Manhattan into Williamsburg and Bushwick, the heart of hipster Brooklyn. It is hard to imagine an area with…
Principles, Policies and Procedures
A principle is a general tenet, a basic rule, a generalized proposition of the highest level. A policy is an organizational plan of action. A procedure is a particular set of actions. Principles exist across institutions and sectors; they emerge through complicated, almost philosophical debate. Policies exist within organizations; they are localized, developed, implemented and…
Scribed Thoughts on Technology and Change
The Livescribe Echo pen is a fascinating technological innovation. A pen with the ability to record sound, connect it with the text that it writes and then upload it to computer, the pen truly is “smart.” Recently profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Clive Thompson “The Pen That Never Forgets“, the Livescribe…