This month's Atlantic

There's an essay by Ross Douthat called The Truth About Harvard that talks about how students, especially humanities students, at elite universities don't work all that hard, and how there is no meaningful academic core. One thing he says is that there are only isolated pockets of greatness where a professor can engage the class and make them actually learn something. I followed up on some links and this Douthat seems like a very perceptive fellow. Got to keep an eye out for his stuff in the future.

There's another piece by David Kennedy about how George W. Bush's foreign policy is pretty much Wilsonian, and that this policy is sort of a natural expression of America. I was always sympathetic towards Wilsonian ideas, and to the stated aims of the Bush presidency (leaving aside for a moment quesions about their execution of those aims). Anyway, David M Kennedy (together with Thomas Sheehan) taught two-thirds of my freshman humanities requirement in just the kind of sweeping, engaging, oversubscribed course Douthat writes about. It was called Democratic Societies and the two-quarter class was just the kind of classic three-millenium survey of the intellectual, historical, and material history of American democracy you'd think went out of style decades ago. So a big thank you to David Kennedy for being part of that.

I was happy to see that I don't fit Douthat's mold for the typical liberal-turned-lebertarian. I'll have you all know I read Friedman and Mill first, and only got around to Atlas Shrugged last summer, so I could see what all the fuss was about. I am different and special. So there.

UPDATE: I wrote about reading Rand in one of those dispatches from Berlin that got this whole bloggging thing going. I know people liked reading those, and I'll get them back up online soon.