Daedalus articles from June 2005

Daedalus archives from June 2005

The new politics of Supreme Court appointments.
June 22, 2005... In all probability, George Bush will soon fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and for all his rhetoric about bipartisanship, he is clearly spoiling for a fight. Not only has Bush pledged to appoint justices in the mold of the Court's most...

The professions in America today: crucial but fragile.
June 22, 2005... Whether one sees the professions as a high point of human achievement, or, in George Bernard Shaw's piquant phrase, as a "conspiracy against the laity," there is little question that they have played a dominant role in industrial and...

Markets vs. professions: value added?
June 22, 2005... The prestige of the traditional professions is under siege. Not just their performance but also their claim to distinct expertise, the very core of professional legitimacy, has come under withering fire. Skepticism is particularly leveled at...

Passion & mastery in balance: toward good work in the professions.
June 22, 2005... Whether or not people belong to a true 'profession' as sociologists define the term, they usually consider professionalism to be a quality worth striving for. To call someone a pro implies that the person knows what to do and does it well....

Good work, from Homer to the present.
June 22, 2005... Work has long been understood as an ethical practice within a more comprehensive moral economy. Yet students of the modern professions have often ignored the ethical aspects of work. One can therefore only applaud contemporary reform efforts...

Compromised work.
June 22, 2005... One would like to find an abundance of good workers across the professions: teachers who have mastered their subject matter, present it well, and behave in a civil manner toward students and peers; physicians who are knowledgeable about the...

Signature pedagogies in the professions.
June 22, 2005... The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study...

Engagement in a profession: the case of undergraduate teaching.
June 22, 2005... "When I was at Yale, I overheard a conversation between two famous senior professors. The two were talking about the fact that they did not like teaching undergraduates and preferred to teach graduate students, and to do research. They were...

Politics, professionalism & the pleasure of reading.
June 22, 2005... A few short years ago, the state of literary studies was a subject of public controversy. According to some commentators, the study of literature at the university level had been seized by a malign spirit. Rather than conserving and...

To the present tense.(Poem)
June 22, 2005... By the time you are by the time you come to be by the time you read this by the time you are written by the time you forget by the time you are water through fingers by the time you are taken for granted by the time it hurts by...

Grandmother's nose.(Short Story)
June 22, 2005... She had only just begun to think about the world around her. Until this summer, she and the world had been much the same thing, a sweet seamless blur of life in life. But now it had broken away from her and become, not herself, but the place...

Dialogue between Leszek Kolakowski & Danny Postel: on exile, philosophy & tottering insecurely on the edge of an unknown abyss.
June 22, 2005... DANNY POSTEL: You've been living outside of Poland since 1968. Two decades ago you wrote an essay titled "In Praise of Exile," though in it you don't discuss your own exile. Do you feel that your exile has shaped the way you think about and...

Gustavo Perez Firmat: on bilingualism & its discontents.
June 22, 2005... In a letter written toward the end of his life, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev remarked that a writer who did not write only in his mother tongue was a thief and a pig. Although Turgenev did not explain the epithets, it's not difficult to...

Richard Stern: on how the stories changed.
June 22, 2005... There are many handles on history. You can study changing styles of transportation, communication, jokes, songs, clothes, cuisine, curses, and what have you. For half a century, my professional handle was the stories written by students at the...

Donald P. Green: on evidence-based political science.
June 22, 2005... The advent of the evidence-based movement in fields as varied as medicine, criminology, and education represents not simply a new thirst for evidence, but for evidence of a particular kind. Far from issuing banal appeals for data, advocates of...