I like Nicholas Lemann’s work, even if I have real problems with his book on the Second Great Migration, which doesn’t matter, ’cause it appears that this book will replace it as the must read book on that topic.

Anyway, this essay, here, makes a sound argument regarding the unnecessary hand-wringing over education. I liked this description of democracy:

It is also, like democracy itself, loose, shaggy, and inefficient, full of redundancies and conflicting goals. It serves many constituencies and interest groups, each of which, in the manner of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, sees its purpose differently.

I do wish he’d cited David Berliner’s book from 1996, The Manufactured Crisis, which makes a very similar argument.