Education

I like obscure pieces of information. I can sing the theme songs to Bonanza and The Big Bang Theory. I know what time the local landfill closes. I can quote Dylan Thomas, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Shakespeare. But there are many, many things I don’t know and that’s where librarians come in.

Today’s attack on Hezbollah struck a new kind of blow. It felt like a science-fiction film, one Lebanese friend told me. At almost exactly the same moment—3:30 p.m. today—pagers exploded all over Lebanon, leaving hideous gashes and wounds on the heads, hands, and hips of their owners.

Not long ago, Mark Chiverton, a 33-year-old in the U.K., noticed he was making a lot of silly mistakes. He’d mix up words when writing emails, or blank on a basic term while talking to his wife.

IN THE SUMMER of 1970, as part of the group exhibition “Information,” one of the first major surveys of conceptual art, the artist Hans Haacke presented a work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “Poll of MoMA Visitors.

In a bid to improve quality of government schools both in terms of edu action and holistic development of students, Bihar government has now decided to rank the institutions on specific quantifiable parameters.

I once asked an auditorium of undergraduates to recall their earliest memories of math. One of them shared a scene so peculiar—and yet so universal—that it burrowed deep into my unconscious, to the point where it has begun to feel like a memory of my own.

In the essays collected in Geography of the Imagination, one can glimpse the inner workings of the mind of a 20th-century literary genius. Whitman appearing at Poe’s funeral, toward the back. A young Picasso catching a glimpse of the prehistoric bull paintings at Altamira.

Nearly all U.S. adults used to have close friends. In 1990, the share of the population that said they didn’t was low and roughly the same no matter one’s education level: just 2% for people with college degrees and 3% for those without.

The sun​ still sparkles on the sapphire sea at Mamallapuram.

This is a line of poetry by the Arab poet al-Harith ibn Hilliza, composed more than 1400 years ago. This is the tradition to which Palestine and Palestinian literature belong. Life, never easy for the noble and the just, is not worth living without dignity, he tells us.