I am not even remotely disappointed

[eaglesmith]

Thankfully, I'm the scion of two left wing academics so the marching orders that I got when I left for BC were, "[T]ake courses that interest you and teach you to think and challenge yourself. Don't worry about what will happen after college." Over time, I've come to view that as some of the best advice my parents offered me during my lifetime.

Agreed. All the recent carping about how we need more STEM majors has some truth to it, but it's so overblown in that it makes no distinction between getting a good solid A&S degree and the kids who major in "Social Justice" or the like where they never learn critical thinking skills. If you can write 15-20 page papers where you're require to examine a variety of sources, challenge conventional thinking, and propose and defend a particular argument, you can learn a lot of other job-specific skills after college. I think many of the humanities majors these days are all multiple choice tests and papers that require no analytical rigor, which leads to the idiots with $150k in debt who can't research, write coherently, or make analytical judgments because they only learned to discuss their feelings in their Gender Studies major.

[TontoKowalski]

I too enjoyed Fr. Madigan (I think it was Ancient Greek Philosophy)- he was brilliant but accessible, and he loved the material. It was the worst grade of my BC career, but also one of the most enriching.

As a Poli. Sci. guy, Hafner was my favorite. He had this insane syllabus that he handed out on the first day, including the rubric he used for giving out grades. The characteristics of an "A" paper were the most daunting articulation I've ever seen.

Hafner was awesome - even people I know who vehemently disagreed with literally everything out of the man's mouth (didn't Hafner work for Carter?) agreed that he was a phenomenal, driving professor. I took a history class with a guy named Braude (I think?) who, in the 90s, used to say in class that the most important event in our lifetime was the Iranian revolution and seizure of the embassy. The rest of the students thought he was nuts but he uncorked a sweet dialogue he had developed linking Islamic terrorists to Hassan, founder of the assassins and the Old Man of the Mountain, to the Ottoman assault on Vienna, etc... I wonder what it's like in his classes 11 years after 9/11.

So... I obviously make my living in sciencey/mathy/technological domains, fine, but I'd like to point out that having a classical education in such a field makes you the proverbial one-eyed-man in the kingdom of the blind. Once upon a time, scientists were big thinkers first and science-y tinkerers second... Copernicus was an economist, Newton ran the British mint, etc... the modern understanding of scientific study generally produces people with laser focus in a few domains and no ability to frame anything else in perspective. This is sort of a terrible idea and it means that all the world outside of the chosen domain is a great mystery to such a person and further, the intellectual tools they have cultivated and developed (intense, patient, slow study of materials that are generally accepted as mostly factual and proven) do not really serve to understand the wider world.

In the words of Heinlein, 'specialization is for insects'.

[vegasEagle]

I am not even remotely disappointed

and this thread has taken a strange turn (ellipses)

[eaglesmith]

Yep. Because I knew I was going to go to law school when I started school, I was perfectly happy not to be a business or math major and indulge in a steady intellectual diet of history and the writings of dead white guys. And it did make me a better writer.

And militant, I realize I did not fully answer your question. My go to everyday "reads" are the WSJ, the blogs of The New Republic, National Review, Weekly Standard, Times of London, The Economist and The Atlantic, a couple of sports websites and few individual writers--Jim Pethokoukis, Ralph Peters, Ross Douhat, Ezra Klein, Mark Helprin, Jonah Goldberg. I also think you should always be working on a new book--I just finished Eisenhower in War and Peace and am now starting Niall Ferguson's Civilization. In addition, I also think you should re-read something you enjoyed--as the occassional break from the new stuff--right now I am reading through a couple of chapters of Ben Graham's Security Analysis and later this week want to re-read Victor Davis Hanson's The Father of Us All.

I thought of this thread for some reason today and I'd love to hear Dick's thoughts on the New Republic's current state.

[vegasEagle]

Yep. Because I knew I was going to go to law school when I started school, I was perfectly happy not to be a business or math major and indulge in a steady intellectual diet of history and the writings of dead white guys. And it did make me a better writer.

And militant, I realize I did not fully answer your question. My go to everyday "reads" are the WSJ, the blogs of The New Republic, National Review, Weekly Standard, Times of London, The Economist and The Atlantic, a couple of sports websites and few individual writers--Jim Pethokoukis, Ralph Peters, Ross Douhat, Ezra Klein, Mark Helprin, Jonah Goldberg. I also think you should always be working on a new book--I just finished Eisenhower in War and Peace and am now starting Niall Ferguson's Civilization. In addition, I also think you should re-read something you enjoyed--as the occassional break from the new stuff--right now I am reading through a couple of chapters of Ben Graham's Security Analysis and later this week want to re-read Victor Davis Hanson's The Father of Us All.

I thought of this thread for some reason today and I'd love to hear Dick's thoughts on the New Republic's current state.

read this old Angry D post. went to cast my vote for AHY. Missed the deadline. When will the ASSHAT decade team be released? All-Century ASSHAT countdown? Cuz this mf is so full of shit it unbelievable. How much meth do you have to do to stay awake to read all that miserable shit?

[Dick Rosenthal]

Yep. Because I knew I was going to go to law school when I started school, I was perfectly happy not to be a business or math major and indulge in a steady intellectual diet of history and the writings of dead white guys. And it did make me a better writer.

And militant, I realize I did not fully answer your question. My go to everyday "reads" are the WSJ, the blogs of The New Republic, National Review, Weekly Standard, Times of London, The Economist and The Atlantic, a couple of sports websites and few individual writers--Jim Pethokoukis, Ralph Peters, Ross Douhat, Ezra Klein, Mark Helprin, Jonah Goldberg. I also think you should always be working on a new book--I just finished Eisenhower in War and Peace and am now starting Niall Ferguson's Civilization. In addition, I also think you should re-read something you enjoyed--as the occassional break from the new stuff--right now I am reading through a couple of chapters of Ben Graham's Security Analysis and later this week want to re-read Victor Davis Hanson's The Father of Us All.

I thought of this thread for some reason today and I'd love to hear Dick's thoughts on the New Republic's current state.

What has happened is the inexorable result of what happens when you take an imbecile who owes his wealth solely to the cosmic accident that made him Zuckerberg's roommate at Harvard and allow him to purchase a once proud publication. Said imbecile lacks either the business sense or the management chops to run a complex organization like TNR--indeed, about the only thing he is qualified to do is hang out near glory holes--and the results speak for themselves.

TNR was the home of the sensible Democrat (to the extent they still exist)--the Brookings Institute crowd. When Michael Kelly was the editor they did some great stuff and later, despite the Stephen Glass debacle, they had righted the ship and were doing some interesting stuff going after Obama from the Center-Left. The problem is, there is no room for sensible Democrats in Barrack Obama's Democrat Party and there is particularly no room for those who wish to see Israel exist and prosper. The angry queen could not allow the publication to go on in that fashion and so he destroyed it in a petulant fit of pique, probably brought on by his wife/husband's disastrous congressional run.

I have now no doubt the angry queen has the cash to keep the thing afloat, but it is already a shambles. I expect it will survive as a warmed over shadow of Harper's or The Atlantic. Harper's is unreadable at this point and The Atlantic keeps putting stupid shit on its cover, so I don't know that TNR will be able to cobble together an audience outside of illiterate white kids with dread locks who live at home despite being 29 and call themselves "veterands" of the Occupy Movement.