Lee Jong-Wha at Project Syndicate:
Around the world, governments are racing to build world-class universities. From Germany’s Exzellenzinitiative to India’s “Institutes of Eminence,” the goal is the same: to cultivate institutions that attract and nurture top global talent, conduct cutting-edge research, and drive innovation and growth. But the stakes are particularly high in the United States and China, given the escalating competition between the world’s two largest economies.
The struggle to lead in higher education is about more than prestige. Elite universities affect economic performance in myriad ways, including by fostering innovation, boosting productivity, and increasing individual earnings. Graduates from top-tier institutions are more likely to become scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. At the national level, countries with higher average university quality tend to enjoy faster technological development and stronger productivity.
A few years ago, any comparison of US and Chinese higher education would have been no contest.
More here.
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My faith first wavers
Keith Krehbiel lived with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 25 years before agreeing to try a brain implant that might alleviate his symptoms. He had long been reluctant to submit to the surgery. “It was a big move,” he says. But by 2020, his symptoms had become so severe that he grudgingly agreed to go ahead.
Not long ago, Dr. Richard Menger, a neurosurgeon, was ready to operate on a 16-year-old with complex scoliosis. A team of doctors had spent months preparing for the surgery, consulting orthopedists and cardiologists, even printing a 3D model of the teen’s spine. The surgery was scheduled for a Friday when Menger got the news: the teen’s insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, had denied coverage of the surgery.
“It appears early life got trapped in a minima of metabolic efficiency. Everything on that planet is starving. Meaning they can’t run their brains for a full day-night cycle. So they just… turn themselves off. Their consciousness dies. Then they reboot with the same memories in the morning. Of course, the memories are integrated differently each time into an entirely new standing consciousness wave.”
Recently, I found myself pouring my heart out, not to a human, but to a chatbot named Wysa on my phone. It nodded – virtually – asked me how I was feeling and gently suggested trying breathing exercises.
The Democratic Party is in crisis, and it goes far beyond the stereotypical “Dems in Disarray” headlines. The party’s popularity numbers are abysmal: a 
As it emerged after the overthrow of Reconstruction, when black voices were again being silenced in public and civic spheres, the blues became an alternative form of communication. As Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown reminded the noted folklorist William Ferris,
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In this wide-ranging interview, Paul Bloom explores how our best qualities, reason, morality, and compassion, can be paradoxically undercut by the very forces meant to protect them. Looking at his work on Perversity, he reveals the tightrope between chaos and autonomy, making human goodness not just aspirational but fragile, easily distorted, often misunderstood, and vulnerable to both logic and emotion when taken to extremes.
Purism was intended as a way of uniting the rigours of classicism with the modernity of the machine age. Flat planes of colour were combined with a highly symbolic visual language. Its most famous adherent was Fernand Léger. At the Ozenfant Academy, this slightly chilly left-brain philosophy of art existed alongside a dictatorial regime. Students were instructed in drawing with unforgiving hard pencils and giant sheets of paper, and encouraged towards exactness of line – sketching was a dirty word. They drew the same model, who held the same pose for two weeks. The actress Dulcie Gray, who attended the school, recalled that in the winter, the side of the model nearest the stove turned scarlet, while the other side was blue with cold. If the morning’s drawings passed muster, students were permitted to paint. A chart on the wall showed the colours they were allowed to use; the paint was to be applied according to an approved technique which yielded a consistent finish.
We’d heard about the “€1 house” programme in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The programme, I soon learned, was actually a loose collection of schemes that economically struggling towns used to lure outside investment and new residents. The campaigns seemed to me to have been largely successful – some towns had sold all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as €1 house promotion over the years. By attracting international buyers to a house that “costs less than a cup of coffee”, as one piece put it, some of Italy’s most remote towns now had new life circulating through them. Many local officials had come to see €1 house experiments as their potential salvation.
I began researching the lives of two 19th-century figures who have both been described as disinhibited. The first was a railroad construction foreman, Phineas Gage. The second was the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge in England). The two were contemporaries, and both lived in San Francisco for a time. Both were injured in accidents. But there the similarities end. Despite Muybridge’s brain injury being well documented and despite it transforming him, as some claim, in profound and disastrous ways, he scarcely features in the brain science literature, and his legacy remains predominantly that of an artistic and technical genius. Gage, by contrast, became famous for the outrageous behaviour that supposedly resulted from his injury. The literature paints him as a kind of avatar for behavioural dysfunction, with every other aspect of his life overshadowed by his status as disinhibition’s patient zero. Why are the legacies of these two ‘disinhibited’ people so different? I believe the answer tells us almost everything we need to know about the condition, about its origins and its continued use today.
America has