Education

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.

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.

Hunkered over a Xerox machine at an ad agency above a flower shop on Melrose Avenue, Daniel Ellsberg began the laborious process of photocopying the smuggled documents that he hoped would end the Vietnam War.

It’s irrational to be cynical, so why is it becoming more prevalent? We all know someone — maybe it’s a friend, a co-worker, a family member — who always manages to be the voice of doom. The person who always knows that something is pointless or won’t succeed.

For decades, schools have allowed children to advance to the next grade even when they’re not reading at grade level. But more and more states are adopting policies to hold students back if they fail standardized tests in reading.

Harvey Mansfield’s book on “manliness” prefigured JD Vance’s musings about “childless cat ladies” by nearly two decades. When you think about the defining voices of the Trump-era Republican party, Harvard political theorists aren’t typically at the top of the list.

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.

Big changes are coming for the UK’s private schools. From January next year, they will no longer be exempt from paying 20% VAT, and the 80% business rate discount will also be removed for independent schools in England and Wales that operate as charities.

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.

We could call the time in which we live the “Infor­ma­tion Age.” Or we could describe it more vivid­ly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Mar­tin Scors­ese and Steven Spiel­berg, Oprah Win­frey and Martha Stew­art, Bey­on­cé and Bob Dylan.