“Free Schools is a pragmatic and polemical sequel to Jonathan Kozol’s National Book Award‐winning Death at an Early Age. In the latter, Kozol described his brief career as an innovative teacher in the Boston Public Schools and his confrontations with its administrators, In the present book, he describes (and recommends) the far more wide‐ranging confrontations necessary to the founding of a Free School, such as the one he and a small group have successfully run for six years in the black ghetto of Roxbury, Mass. Set up in the ghetto by teachers and parents who can no longer tolerate public schools, supported by their mutual efforts and dedicated to the education of children in all the conventional skills, this kind of Free School isn’t to be confused with an operation like Ocean Hill‐Brownsville or other public‐school‐affiliated ventures that, however admirable, represent for Kozol merely an alternative within the…

Beatniks on parade 1958.

“Part I. In 1958, in Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco, I was in the twelfth grade. In Mrs. Weatherby’s English class, a history of literature, the mandatory play was Hamlet. We had come to Wordsworth about the time of the Howl trial in San Francisco. Beatnik life exposés filled the Chronicle. Grant Avenue seemed like a bizarre heaven of music, strange poetry, weird characters—a break from the Eisenhower ordinary. That spring I went over to the Grant Avenue Fair with my friend Bob. The afternoon was sunny, with a slight bite to the wind, and flooded with people. Up Grant were coffeehouses, booth after booth of craftspeople and artists, lots of sandals and canvas paintings. Inside a storefront two black musicians were playing, one the congos, the other a flute. … Bob and I walked up the street and stared…

“Experience should be gained before one reaches forty, so a wise man has said. After forty it is permissible for one to comment. I venture to say that the reverse might apply in my case. No one under forty was more certain of his theories and no one more willing to elucidate them than I was. No one knew better or could visualize more. But now that I am somewhat older I have become rather more cautious. The experience that I have gained, and which I am still sorting out, is of such a kind that I am unwilling to express myself on the art of the filmmaker. I know for a fact that my work involves technical skill and mental ability, but I know, too, that even my greatest experience will be uninteresting to others, except perhaps to the potential filmmaker. Moreover, it is my opinion that an artist’s…

Forbes has reported that Elon Musk’s net worth just reached $225.2 BILLION — very likely making him “the richest person to ever walk the planet.”

He has passed both Google co-founder Larry Page (#6), as well as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (#7) — and widened the gap between him and Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.

When you begin the PhD you will be told to read, and read a lot. But you’ll find not any old approach to reading will do. It’s a particular kind of reading that’s expected. So it’s important to get a grip on the complex task that you are being asked to do. In the first instance your reading helps you to:

• Scope the field or fields that you are in, so that you understand what is relevant to your topic, and what is not. You also need to get clear on the “core” of your discipline(s) and its threshold concepts – the ideas that anybody doing any topic in the discipline, including you, need to take account of. Knowing them also means you can understand and join in the conversations in your disciplinary community.

• Map the field in relation to your particular topic so you can see key themes, major…

“The movies now give us an ‘epic’ nearly every week of the year. Digital technology, corporate budgets and the public’s own current thirst for shallow escapism have paved the way for visions both ludicrous and wondrous. … But what do these films have to say? As we wallow in popcorn excess, Janus Films restores and re-releases the grandest, deepest epic of all, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. Made in 1967, it shames everything, and I mean absolutely everything, playing at the ArcLight today. Slated for a June release on DVD and Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection, it is touring various arthouse spots and must be seen on a proper, wide canvas. … If the average Marvel movie runs about 2 hours and 22 minutes, Bondarchuk’s sweeping rendition of Leo Tolstoy’s immortal novel clocks in at about 7 hours. It was a product of the Cold War, when political rivalry made…

“When Robert Wilson’s work  first appeared internationally it was generally seen from a single and limited viewpoint—as a return to the image. Wilson was understood as a proponent of two-dimensional theater, of theater to be looked at only. This was because he came into the public eye at the beginning of the ’70s, when the figurative gesture ruled supreme on the stage, and the body, in its expressive entirety, was at the center of a tendency to involve the spectator. But Wilson’s push was to stretch the visual; it was a recuperation of the grand deliriums of the Surrealist painters, basing dramatic narrative on a simple sequence of backdrops and the unfolding of a tableau vivant, immobile yet in continuous and unstoppable evolution. … Time is a determining factor in musical discourse, too, and musical organization has determined structure in Wilson’s work as early on as Deafman Glance

“Inevitably, a simple synopsis of V. S. Naipaul’s new novel must, by creating the impression of alternatively rolling and thundering action, wholly distort its nature and quality. The scene shifts from rooming-house London to the Caribbean island of ‘Isabella,’ a British dependency, and back to England again. The time covers nearly 20 years in the life of the narrator-protagonist, Ralph Singh, a native of Isabella and later a political exile-refugee from it. (Naipaul, who has lived in London since his Oxford years, was born and raised in Trinidad, where his Indian grandfather had settled.) The recollected events of the novel include Singh’s intermittent and furtive sexual history, his marriage to an English girl, whose Byzantine taste in cosmetics includes painting her breasts gaudily, and the gradual corrosion and final disintegration of the marriage beneath the tropical moon. ‘The Mimic Men’ also tells us how Singh amassed a fortune, in consequence…