John Brown's Notes and Essays

Timothy Garton Ash, The New York Review of Books (October 24, 2019) Gabriel Kuchta/Getty Images Demonstrators at a rally demanding the resignation of Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, Prague, June 23, 2019 Prague, July 2019. I’m sitting with Ivan Havel in a cozy alcove of the Austro-Hungarian–themed Monarchie restaurant when Monika Pajerová arrives. A student leader in the Velvet Revolution and still bubbling with energy thirty years later, blond, bespectacled Monika takes a smartphone out of her handbag and scans the barcode on my bottle of mineral water. The phone buzzes and displays a green-ink caricature of Andrej Babiš, the agribusiness oligarch and former secret police informer who is now the Czech prime minister. Beneath his frowning face are the words “ Bez Andreje ” (loosely translatable as “does not contain Andrej”), indicating that this bottled water is not a product of any of his companies. “It’s all right,” says Monika, “you can drink it!” A week earlier there...

It wasn’t Bloom. But it wasn’t not Bloom, either. By  Joe Karaganis   and   David McClure,   The New York Times Mr. Karaganis and Mr. McClure work at Open Syllabus, a nonprofit research organization; see also Oct. 19, 2019 Harold Bloom, in 2003 It’s often hard to know when an era begins and ends, but the recent deaths of the novelist Toni Morrison (in August) and the literary scholar Harold Bloom (on Monday) make a case for putting the era of literary canon wars to rest. In the early 1990s, Mr. Bloom and Ms. Morrison stood on opposite sides of a cultural debate about what to read in college and, more broadly, about how to read. Mr. Bloom defended education as a process of intense personal engagement with great works, envisioned as a way to “enlarge a solitary existence.” He viewed the traditional Western canon as the time-tested subject of that engagement and even  produced a list  to clarify which literary works he conside...

Image from article Valerie Strauss ,   The Washington Post , Oct. 18, 2019 at 2:30 p.m. EDT; article contains a video with caption: "Authorities charged more than 50 people, like actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, March 12 with being part of a long-running college admittance scam." Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, which opposes the misuse of standardized tests, said the past year has seen the “fastest growth spurt ever” of schools ending the SAT/ACT test score as an admission requirement. Over the summer, more than one school a week announced the change.  Nearly 50 accredited colleges and universities that award bachelor’s degrees announced from September 2018 to September 2019 that they were dropping the admissions requirement for an SAT or ACT score, FairTest said. That brings the number of accredited schools to have done so to 1,050 — about 40 percent of the total, the nonprofit said.  While the test-optional lis...