Most working adults don’t dream of spending a week of their summer tromping through the mountains with 150 high schoolers and a copy of Plato’s Meno.  But the staff of Wheatstone Academy are an odd bunch. Wheatstone Academy is the brainchild of Dr. John Mark Reynolds, founder and director of the...

The old man had been on the sea for days; the marlin pulled his small boat hour after hour. My mouth was dry, nearly salty. I felt the weight of isolation–the weight of being on a vast ocean that is void of another human form. Ernest Hemmingway tossed me into the skiff and sent it to sea. Fiction...

This is an apologetic for the importance of paying attention in history class. I teach high school history, and I fully understand the boredom history class usually breeds in students. While I’m happy to spend 85 minutes discussing the variations of Christian doctrine among the peasant classes of...

Reading is a conversation. Reading a good book or a good poem is like talking with someone who has thought things through and has managed to come up with something that is really worth saying. Our reading practices should reflect that reality. Just because there is not a person sitting in front of us...

Don’t say as you do, and you’ll do as you say. Linguists can keep debating over whether cultural thought shapes language or language shapes cultural thought. PC—oh, I mean, ‘politically correctness’—cast its vote long ago. The theory behind mashing English through androgynous cookie cutters...

The small towns of America’s heartland are becoming an endangered species, argue researchers Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas in Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America—a lengthy title for a slim and troubling ethnography. In a nation where urban studies...

“Do you know anything about graduate school applications?” My boyfriend Matthew, like me, is a junior in college and beginning to think about (that is, be overwhelmed by) the nearing terrors called ‘grad school apps’. My mother half laughed—the kind that is mostly air whistling through the...

If you have an opinion, there’s probably a brand of conservatism just for you.  If you care most about faith and values, for example, you might consider yourself a social conservative.  Those who worry about preserving the culture are paleo-conservatives, and neo-conservatives consider national...

It is an often-overlooked truth that a mathematician is a good friend to have. In my case, I happen to have a best friend who has dedicated years of his life to the study of mathematics. We make quite a pair, and there is a unique quality to our friendship in that our conversations often dwell on how...

There is hardly a student in the United States whose work remains wholly untouched by the influence of the Modern Language Association. Whether a fledgling upstart or a seasoned scholar, anyone doing academic work in the humanities has been guided through the massive collaborative effort of the MLA....