I've enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's work, alluding previously to his The Tipping Point whilst offering reviews of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and of Outliers: The Story of Success.  Thus, when his Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering turned up at a railway station bookstore on ( Read more... )

After my recent series of mini-dissertations, a change of pace.

Robin DiAngelo's Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm provides for an opportunity to offer a succinct Book Review No. 4.

The correct answer to that "how" is "by enabling dysfunction and calling it affirming diversity."  That's not where she goes, but it ( Read more... )

Major Garrett and David Becker's The Big Truth:  Upholding Democracy in the Age of THE BIG LIE pretty well tells readers what their message is and what their priors are.  Let me open Book Review No. 3 by expressing general agreement with their central message, about the 2020 presidential election, which is that Donald Trump failed to turn out ( Read more... )

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I've long maintained that those U.S. News guides exist because so much of higher education has gone down the rat-holes of access, assessment, remediation, and retention, and kids with ambition (or pushy parents?) buy those guides in order to identify institutions where students might pick up a respectable education (or at least validate their ( Read more... )

For Book Reviews No. 4 and No. 5, we will (briefly) consider Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (the same duo that gave us Shattered at the end of the 2016 presidential election) along with Mollie Hemingway's Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.  After that subtitle ( Read more... )

My rating: 4/5 ( Read more... )

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