The New Republic

The other day I picked up a copy of The Adventures of Augie March. I hadn’t remembered that Saul Bellow, writing in the early 1950s, when he was not yet forty, about Chicago in the 1920s, had been in full sympathy with the urban poor, as he definitely was not later in his career. READ MORE >>

Young Republicans and College Democrats have their perks—the occasional trip to a state party convention, maybe—but they can’t hope to compete with young centrists. When a dozen college students came to St. Louis recently as part of a competition funded by the 85-year-old billionaire deficit hawk Pete Peterson, they were put up in the Ritz-Carlton, while the hundreds of other students attending the same conference stayed in humbler quarters. READ MORE >>

It’s been a few weeks now since Susan Patton—the veteran human resources consultant who made sure to tell the world she went to Princeton, and also made sure to declare that her two sons did (both the older, married one who she feels “could have married anyone” and his single younger brother)—wrote her blunt letter to the college paper there. In it, she urged young female Princeton Tigers (Tigresses? READ MORE >>

The Supreme Court made clear last month that it would keep affirmative action racial preferences on the front burner of the national conversation for at least the next year. This autumn, the Court will review a federal appeals court’s 8-7 decision striking down a 2006 Michigan voter initiative that banned racial preferences in state university admissions. READ MORE >>

Last Friday, erstwhile all-star Atlanta Schools superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 Atlanta administrators, principals, teachers and other staff were indicted on multiple counts, including conspiracy charges under a RICO statute often used to prosecute organized crime figures and drug dealers. The indi READ MORE >>

In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. READ MORE >>

Every week, it seems, there’s another gender-related dustup in the technology world. The leader of a hacker movement quits over misogyny. A person in charge of recruiting Web developers is fired after publicly calling out sexual comments at a conference. READ MORE >>

Ever since conservatives began describing plans to privatize public education as a matter of “school choice,” dubious pedagogies have been using the phrase in their own defenses. And while some initiatives, such as the most successful charter schools, deliver much-touted results, many others entrench the disparities between rich and poor, minorities and whites, that education reformers hope to erase. One of the latest brands of education seeking safe passage from the choice movement mandates a different kind of separation: boys from girls.  READ MORE >>

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn’t have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas. This is the sad lesson of President Barack Obama’s boldest attempt to control the cost of college education, which has been rising inexorably for a decade. READ MORE >>

President Obama's preschool proposal has provoked predictable grousing from some predictable sources. House Speaker John Boehner said last week that getting the federal government involved in early childhood was "a good way to screw it up." But the idea is also picking up some support on the right. "President Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious way," New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote on Friday. READ MORE >>