Because English totalitarianism is killing culture and science!

IN THE NOVEMBER 24, 2011 ISSUE

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? Anthony Grafton Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops. Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause Ezra Klein The fundamental constraints on the administration’s leaders have not been economic or conceptual, but political. They know they need to act. But they can’t act, or at least they can’t act at the scale necessary to really change the economic situation. Republicans won’t let them. ‘Elegy to the Void’ Cathleen Schine Blue Nights describes Joan Didion’s descent into the inevitability of living in a world not only without her husband, not only without her daughter, but, finally, without hope. The book is possessed by an immeasurable, unrelenting despair. And it is alive with what is lost. Rising Up in Israel Eyal Press ”Bibi you hog, give back the state!” proclaimed a sign that captured the prevailing mood at Israel’s social protests this summer. Much of the outrage was directed at the group of families who now control an estimated 30 percent of the Israeli economy. Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater Garry Wills Verdi did not take lightly the duty of being true to Shakespeare. When he read the score of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, he said of the librettists, “Poor Shakespeare! How they have mistreated him!” He did not mean to mistreat the great dramatist himself. Financial Reform: Unfinished Business Paul Volcker One thing is sure: We can no longer rely on ad hoc responses in dealing with increasingly frequent, complex, and dangerous financial breakdowns. Structural change is necessary. Plus: Michael Greenberg on Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot,Helen Vendler on Rita Dove’s anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, Brent Staples on Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line, Neal Ascherson on Umberto Eco, Robert Darnton on the national digital library, Thomas Nagel on disgust, John Gray on immortality, and much more. Bringing Light to Norway’s Dark Night Martin Filler Was King Hammurabi a Commie? Charles Simic Day of the 40,000 Dead Alma Guillermoprieto