Opinion

I get uneasy when I read calls for ‘transformative leaders.’ They strike me as taking far too much for granted.

Markdown, a text formatting syntax designed for easy readability but also transformability, gets a lot of love from geeks. Lincoln Mullen has written a great introduction to Markdown for Profhacker if you are unfamiliar with the syntax. My big question when I made the shift away from traditional word processors and began using plaintext and markdown was if it would be flexible enough to support the conventions of scholarly work.

Moretti's The New Geography of Jobs is the perfect companion to Bill Bishop's fine book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Where Bishop talks about the social and cultural impact of the geographic clustering by education and skills, Moretti explains the economic outcomes of this trend.

We don't need to abolish them, but we need fewer of them, and more focus on issues that would help lawyers and judges, writes John G. Browning.

Institutions are making needed changes to how they operate. Leadership also needs to evolve in the sector, writes Stewart E. Sutin.

Academics, mainly those from the domain of human sciences, do not like to be reminded too much about various economic and business-like terms. However, some business models and ideas from the world of economics will help not only greatly improve the financial situation, but will also give a new impetus to the quality of the academic work as such.

As a kid, I loved the Roadrunner cartoons. They were kid-friendly versions of the Sisyphus myth, with lovable characters, preposterous gadgetry, and an endearing disregard for the laws of physics. (To this day, I can’t see the word “Acme” without picturing Wile E. Coyote crashing into the side of a canyon.) I always laughed when the coyote found himself suspended in mid-air, looked down, looked at the camera, and then fell; the suggestion was that gravity only kicked in once you noticed it.