July 2022 – The Scholar's Stage

The World That Twitter Never Made

15 July, 2022By The People, Community, Culture, Domestic Politics

A few months ago Jonathan Haidt made waves with a big think-piece in the Atlantic arguing that most of the ills of the 2010s can be traced back to the invention of the retweet button. I read the essay and disagreed with it vociferously. Today City Journal published my critique. You can read my counter essay here. Below I would like to add some additional thoughts on social media and American politics that could not fit into that piece.

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The Fall of History as a Major–and as a Part of the Humanities

12 July, 2022Education, History

Over on the Scholar’s Stage forum, one forum member asks why the number of American university students selecting history as their chosen four year degree has been on the decline since the 1970s. He offers three hypotheses:

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A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon

01 July, 2022Books and Literature, Culture, History, Japan, The Middle Kingdom

Readers may remember my stab at a global Great Books list. Recently a reader contacted me asking for guidance: they wanted to read through the books on the “East Asian” section of that list, but did not believe he had the proper historical knowledge to understand or contextualize what they were reading. What do I recommend they read to make sense of the list?

What follows will not make sense if you have not looked at that original post. Here is what I told him:

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Monthly Archives: July 2022

The World That Twitter Never Made

The Fall of History as a Major–and as a Part of the Humanities

A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon

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