One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a fam...
[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They’re one way when they’re by themselves, and another when they’re surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves a...