No one will ever admit it at a meeting of composition faculty, but it is no secret that students commonly find taking a composition course a painful experience. Moreover, this is not some recent development which cranky old people can chalk up to “these lazy kids today,” but rather seems…

In discussing the future of housing we hear a great deal about houses, but much less about apartments — and this is not at all accidental. A mere 1 in 6 Americans live in apartments, and while the numbers vary greatly by region, even in highly urbanized New York state…

The Earth4All Project was announced at the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change back in November 2020. Led by teams at the Club of Rome, the Norwegian Business School and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, its activities includes the monthly series of “Deep Dive” papers, the August…

Those who tell us that ours is an age of unprecedented technological change making science fiction into reality never tire of talking about their cell phone — but somehow never seem to have anything to say about a great many other things that are fundamental to daily living. Like housing. …

Those who read Honore de Balzac’s Lost Illusions might be surprised to encounter in it the employment of the claqueur — the professional clapper, hired to applaud. Having invested heavily in a play it was the logical business decision for the producer to buy some insurance for its success —…

Two-and-a-half years ago the COVID-19 pandemic dealt the film industry a truly unprecedented blow, with the (correct) anticipation of collapsing business prompting a rush of delays of major movie releases — starting, as the readers of this blog may remember, with the Bond film No Time to Die. Of course…

The shooting of the last Bond film, No Time to Die, wrapped up back in 2019, and the film itself came out in late 2021. …

In discussing Japan’s low fertility rate and aging population the media (certainly in the U.S., though so far as I can tell, elsewhere as well) has inclined to the crude and the simple-minded, the hot-button and sensationalist — and per usual overlooked important aspects of the matter. Thus we have…

Recent months have brought a great wave of news stories about a shortage of teachers approaching crisis levels — and the possibility that even if such a shortage is not already underway (a difficult thing to establish one way or the other given the scarcity of really comprehensive educational statistics)…